Fundamental science can find real world application in unexpected – and important – ways.

Dr. Dorian Rosen (Pharmacology PhD, 2019), while working in the Alban Gaultier lab, showed that a common SSRI antidepressant, fluvoxamine, can also engage the sigma-1 receptor to dampen cytokine-mediate inflammatory responses, likely by effects on ER stress pathways. Based in part on these findings, and recognizing that excess cytokine production may be involved in the progression of COVID-19, researchers at Washington University initiated a small clinical trial that yielded early encouraging results. Now, as reported today in the Lancet, and highlighted in the New York Times, fluvoxamine was found to improve outcomes in high-risk patients with COVID-19 in a large randomized, placebo-controlled trial out of Brazil.
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Kudos go out to Philip Seegren: Recipient of the 2021Rall Award!

Congratulations to Philip Seegren for being the recipient of the 2021 Ted W. Rall Award for the best paper by a Pharmacology Student published in the calendar year. He received this award for his first-authored manuscript, “Mitochondrial Ca2+ signaling is an electrometabolic switch to fuel phagosome killing”, published in Cell Reports. Philip is a trainee in Bimal Desai’s Lab and describes the published work and findings of he and his colleges below:
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Kudos to Drs. Lazo and Sharlow: KeViRx Awarded Second NIH R43 Grant

KeViRx is an early stage drug discovery company spun out of the UVA Department of Pharmacology by Elizabeth Sharlow and John Lazo and located in Charlottesville. KeViRx was just awarded its second National Institutes of Health R43 Phase 1 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant. This grant (HL158409) is entitled “A PTP4A3 inhibitor for SARS-CoV-2-mediated acute lung injury”. The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) is responsible for the current COVID-19 pandemic. Many COVID-19 patients develop acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and subsequently septic shock and multi-organ failure; about half will die.
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