COVID 19 Q/A: Roger Seheult & John Campbell: Lessons Learned and a Look Ahead
This premire took place on January 4, 2021.
We're excited to host Dr. Michael Mina from the Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health to answer questions about how cheap (approx. $1), at-home, COVID-19 tests (results in 15 minutes) could be utilized to dramatically slow the spread of this pandemic (and open up schools etc. in a faster and safer way).
Dr. Mina's research has shown that the sensitivity of these simple nasal swab or saliva paper antigen tests (these tests are already publicly available in most countries internationally) is high enough to detect the vast majority of infectious COVID-19 and could be utilized by individuals on a near-daily basis at home.
Please watch MedCram COVID-19 Update 98 for context on Dr. Mina's research and ideas.
Michael Mina - Assistant Professor, Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, Department of Epidemiology
Dr. Michael Mina, MD, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and a core member of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics (CCDD). He is additionally an Assistant Professor in Immunology and Infectious Diseases at HSPH and Associate Medical Director in Clinical Microbiology (molecular diagnostics) in the Department of Pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School
He earned his MD and PhD degrees from Emory University, with doctoral work split between CDC, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, the Respiratory and Meningeal Pathogens Research Unit in Johannesburg, South Africa and the Emory Vaccine Center. He completed his post-doctoral work at Princeton University in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (of infectious disease dynamics) with Prof. Bryan Grenfell and at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Genetics with Prof. Stephen Elledge. He completed his residency training in clinical pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital / Harvard Medical School.
Michael’s research combines mathematical and epidemiological models with high-throughput phage-display based serological laboratory investigations, including development of new technologies and statistical pipelines to better understand the population and immunological consequences and patterns underlying infectious diseases. Much of the work towards new technology development is performed in close collaboration with Steve Elledge at HMS. Major themes of his lab include (i) development of new approaches (laboratory and statistical methods) to enable extremely high-throughput serological surveillance of infectious pathogens; (ii) use of high-complexity antibody profiling and epidemiological data to understand the pathogenesis of vaccine preventable diseases, with a specific focus on measles infections and vaccines; (iii) elucidating broad unintended / heterologous effects of vaccines to alter transmission patterns of unrelated infectious pathogens – using serology and dynamical models; and (iv) understanding the life-history of infectious pathogens across ages, genders, geographies and times. In addition to his interests in infectious diseases, his research also explores more fundamental questions of immunity and immune repertoires: how they form, how they persist, how they are passed on and how they become perturbed during natural life-events.