Lessons Learned: Five Years of COVID-19 Research and Response at UCSF

“Pharmacy experts have been at the forefront of our recovery from the COVID pandemic, not only as accessible, trusted health care providers but also as leaders in critical research. The innovative studies that we lead in drug discovery, medication management, public health and regulatory science have been vital to ongoing efforts to build a healthier future for all.

What the pandemic has reinforced for us is that scientific innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration and partnerships that cross academia and industry — all of which require intention and investment — are pivotal to being able to respond effectively to global threats like pandemics.”

— UCSF School of Pharmacy Dean Kathy Giacomini, PhD, BSPharm

“Since our early work on HIV in the 1990s to our more recent work with SARS-CoV-2, working together on NIH-supported collaborative projects shows how we can amplify our impact as a well-coordinated team on these deadly viruses. 

Plagues such as COVID-19 have devastated human populations and have been documented since the plague of Athens (430 BCE). There is every reason to expect these plague cycles to continue. Until the 1930s, there were no effective drugs to treat microbial pandemics, and, even in recent years, previously discovered drugs were initially relied on to target new threats. The drugs in which investments are made today will pay dividends in the inevitable pandemics of the future.”

— Charles Craik, PhD, professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, who investigates proteases (enzymes that break down other proteins) in SARS-CoV-2 replication as well as detecting neutralizing antibodies to the virus

“We learned that when we all have to steer in one direction, we’re pretty good at bulldozing through barriers. Everybody just made it work. And we did get some positives out of the pandemic. We learned to do telehealth better. We got mRNA vaccines, which are completely new. We learned a lot about who is most vulnerable in times of crisis, and who we don’t reach well. When push comes to shove, you can figure out the infrastructure.”

— Katherine Yang, PharmD, MPH, professor in the Department of Clinical Pharmacy, who specializes in the treatment of multi-drug-resistant infections, and an infectious diseases pharmacist specialist at UCSF Health

“One of the biggest lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic is that science and technology are critical to combat pandemics like this. Without the rapid development of the vaccine, the consequences would have been unthinkable.

It is crucial to consider not only patients’ underlying health conditions but also the medications that they take, as both can contribute to individuals’ susceptibility to a pandemic. 

In the case of COVID-19, our research using the tractable zebrafish model system has uncovered that anti-hypertensive medications affect, in a drug-selective way, the organ-specific expression of ACE2, a key protein that mediates cellular entry of SARS-CoV-2. Our findings suggest that switching anti-hypertensive medications from ARBs and ACE inhibitors to renin inhibitors may help alleviate SARS-CoV-2 infection.”

— Su Guo, PhD, director of the Center for Collaborative Innovation at the School of Pharmacy and professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, who has been exploring the repurposing of hypertension medications for COVID-19

“We’ve shown that pharmacists play a key role in public health, and now we have active federal legislation emerging from that time called the Equitable Community Access to Pharmacist Services (ECAPS) bill, which would provide a path for payment for ‘test and treat’ health care services. 

Pharmacists can administer tests — whether it be COVID, flu or strep throat — and then prescribe the therapeutics for that infectious disease. We showed that pharmacies are a key health care access point during the pandemic, and pharmacists are an integral part of health care team to provide timely treatment. And pharmacists are not only trained to do this but we are effective in it.” 

— Lisa Kroon, PharmD, professor in the Department of Clinical Pharmacy and assistant chief pharmacy officer of clinical innovation, education and research at UCSF Health, who oversees ambulatory pharmacy practice and focuses on evaluating the impact of pharmacist provider status and expanded scope of practice in the ambulatory and community pharmacy setting

“The point of the [QBI Coronavirus Research Group] is to be prepared for the next potential pandemic, and that is what the lessons learned will allow us to do so. At this stage we are clearly expanding [research] into viruses other than just the coronavirus.”

— Saumya Gopalkrishnan, scientific project manager in the Quantitative Biosciences Institute (QBI), an organized research unit within the UCSF School of Pharmacy

​​​​​“The biggest lesson for me is that science needs to be more rapid, open and transparent. It was great seeing how preprints were leveraged to rapidly communicate new science, including by UCSF’s QBI Coronavirus Research Group. In addition, the rapid commenting on poor quality preprints (e.g., the one that attempted to draw sequence comparisons between HIV and SARS-CoV-2) showed us that concerns about the necessity of journal-organized peer review were moot.”

— James Fraser, PhD, chair of the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, who is developing inhibitors of a SARS-CoV-2 protein called macrodomain and building a drug to prevent the virus from replicating in human cells.