June 12: Time to breath and get creative
It might not look like it, but researcher Anastasia is waiting. Sort of. Over the last few weeks she and her colleagues have been working tremendously hard on investigating immunity against the coronavirus. Now that they have submitted their article about the results to a scientific journal, her body and brain can rest a bit. "While we're waiting for the journal's response, we finally have some time to breath, get creative ideas for follow-up projects and pick up other experiments again", says Anastasia. "I'm very grateful for getting the opportunity to work on this corona project. Trying to help solve the corona problem fulfills me. I feel useful." Was she, at any time, hesitant about working with a virus that takes other people's lives? "Sure, I had concerns. But I was very certain I wanted to do this and we took strict safety measures. Going to the supermarket would have been much riskier."
May 25: First results show that experiment works
"The first results of our experiment show that our approach works!" says researcher Pia Kvistborg. Her team is using their cancer research technology to try to unravel which exact parts of the coronavirus our immune cells (T cells) can recognize. "It is still too early to say anything about the results, though. We need to carefully analyze them first." It's amazing Pia and her team can still see straight, since their curiosity keeps them in the lab from 7 am until midnight these days. "It's very intense but the team spirit is amazing. During the experiment it's nerve-racking to wait and see whether the green dots appear on our screen, representing immune cells bound to a specific part of the virus. It's so exciting!" Stay tuned for updates.
