BU NEIDL Scientists Join International Coronavirus Research Effort

Amid growing alarm that the novel coronavirus has been transmitting silently among US communities for as long as six weeks, Boston’s top infectious disease researchers, including scientists from Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL), met Monday on the Harvard Medical School campus. They discussed next steps for an ambitious international collaboration that will focus scientific efforts on understanding, detecting, treating, and preventing novel coronavirus, the disease that’s come to be known as COVID-19.

NEIDL scientists, who expect to begin research on live samples of the novel coronavirus possibly as soon as this week inside their high-level biocontainment labs, joined more than 80 other local researchers at the four-hour-long meeting.

To date, the novel coronavirus has infected more than 80,000 people in China and nearly 90,000 people worldwide. Globally, more than 3,000 deaths from the novel coronavirus have been recorded, 6 in the United States.

The general mood of the research group that met Monday was that of determination to do whatever it takes to make a difference, according to Anthony Griffiths, a BU School of Medicine associate professor of microbiology and one of the NEIDL researchers who attended.