ABOVE: Virologist Timothy Carroll (left) and staff research associate Lourdes Adamson (right) in the BSL-3 lab at the University of California, Davis’s Center for Infectious Disease and Immunology
NICOLE DRAZENOVICH
Earlier this year, Mirko Cortese, a postdoc at Heidelberg University in Germany, was busy investigating how the flaviviruses dengue and Zika create cellular environments that support their replication. But as he watched the number of COVID-19 cases climb around the world, including in his home country of Italy, his attention was increasingly diverted to the virus behind the disease: SARS-CoV-2. Cortese and his colleagues had both tools and knowledge necessarily for tackling the coronavirus—so they decided to rapidly shift the focus of their work to address the deepening global crisis. “We basically put aside [our] research projects and focused the majority of our efforts to support the diagnostic team and the clinic,” Cortese says.
Now, Cortese is spending most of his ...
