June 17, 2020 - Discoveries

Coronavirus structure may hold key to treatment

Andrew Ward, PhD, a professor of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology, revealed the first structure of a human coronavirus spike protein in 2017 from the HKU1 virus, and went on to do the same for SARS and MERS. He and his team are now investigating the structure of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and working with collaborators to isolate antibodies from patients. They also developed new imaging methods that may work as a diagnostic tool to probe blood samples from those with COVID-19.