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Chavez Lab’s COVID-19 Research Highlighted in The New Yorker Article
IN HIS ARTICLE The Quest for a Pandemic Pill in The New Yorker magazine published on April 13, 2020, journalist Matthew Hutson reported on Dr. Alex Chavez’s COVID-19 research. Below is that part of the article:
One afternoon in March, I was set to visit the lab of Alejandro Chavez, a frank and fast-talking pathologist and cell biologist at Columbia who is collaborating with Ho. (Their lab buildings are kitty-corner.) A few hours before our appointment, though, I got a message: the university had barred visitors. All nonessential employees had been sent home. Ho and Chavez could carry on with their work, since they were researching SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, but I wouldn’t be allowed in. When I asked if Chavez would give me a virtual tour of the lab by FaceTime, he was skeptical. “It’s not gonna be that exciting, man,” he warned me. “You know what biology looks like. It’s like moving clear fluids from one thing to another. It’s not gonna blow Above: Dr. Chavez (left) laughing with lab members.
your mind.” The lab, sparsely peopled, contained a dozen PCR machines—DNAamplifiers, each about the size of a toaster oven—and shelves cluttered with supplies and glassware. Debbie Hong, a graduate student, was hunched over a lab bench, holding a pipette. “It’s not like the movies, with lasers and lights and, like, crazy cells in green,” Chavez said as he panned his iPhone around his lab. “It’s all pretty benignlooking.” Chavez’s antiviral research focusses on a particular type of protein involved in viral reproduction—a scissoring enzyme known as a protease. In normal cells, ribosomes read instructions encoded in RNA and make a batch of some specified protein. When a virus
like SARS-CoV-2 presents itself to a ribosome, the intruder’s instructions are followed—making the particular proteins that the virus requires in order to replicate. But the ribosome delivers the batch of proteins all linked together in a long chain, a “polyprotein.” So, both cells and viruses then slice up these polyproteins into the smaller pieces they need. It’s a little like what happens at a newspaper-printing plant, when a huge roll of paper spins through the press and then gets sliced up into individual broadsheets. Cells and viruses both use proteases to do the slicing; for Chavez’s team, the challenge is to identify new compounds that will inhibit viral proteases without interfering with a human cell’s (con’t)
