The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Bloomberg School of Public Health recently received a five-year grant that will allow them to study COVID-19 immune response.

The grant – which was awarded by the National Cancer Institute,  a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) – will allow the schools to share $2 million dollars in funding each year as they work to determine why some patients suffer severe symptoms from the virus, while others experience only mild cases. Researchers hope this knowledge will help them to develop more effective treatments and vaccines

From The Baltimore Sun:

“Our new center’s goal is to combine Johns Hopkins’ world-class expertise in immunology, virology, and biostatistics to map out the complexity of the immune response as it develops after infection — and to understand why that response can differ so greatly depending on age, gender, race, comorbidities such as obesity, and other factors,” said Sabra Klein, professor in the Bloomberg School’s department of molecular microbiology and immunology, who will run the center along with Dr. Andrea Cox, professor of medicine for Hopkins Medicine.

“With a center grant like this, we can support multiple investigators working as a team to understand some of the outstanding mysteries of this disease,” she said.

The center will combine research being conducted by more than half a dozen Hopkins labs focused on studying the complexities of the virus. Studying the immune response of patients will help scientists determine if vaccine and drug therapies will need to be modified or improved as they learn more about the virus.

For more information, view the full article from The Baltimore Sun.