ISB researchers and their collaborators looked at the electronic health records of nearly 630,000 patients who were tested for SARS-CoV-2, and found stark disparities in COVID-19 outcomes — odds of infection, hospitalization, and in-hospital mortality — between White and non-White minority racial and ethnic groups.
Providence President and CEO Dr. Rod Hochman joined ISB President and Professor Dr. Jim Heath for an hour-long conversation hosted by ISB and Town Hall Seattle about how healthcare and science will be different in a post-pandemic world.
GeekWire published a story spotlighting ISB’s COVID-19 research. Reporter Lisa Stiffler spoke with ISB President Dr. Jim Heath about the breakneck pace ISB and all of our collaborative partners are working at to tease out COVID’s biological secrets to advance the understanding and treatment of the novel coronavirus.
Findings from the ISB-Swedish COVID-19 Immune Response Study suggest that treatments aimed at arresting the infection at the stage of moderate severity may be most effective. The team studied 139 patients and found that mild COVID-19 is very distinct from the moderate or severe forms of disease, which appear surprisingly similar.
Dr. Knatokie Ford was the featured speaker of a virtual event hosted by ISB and Town Hall Seattle, and shared many of the experiences that helped pave her way to become a leading voice in STEM policy and advocacy, and identified several ways parents and teachers can encourage kids to become tomorrow’s STEM professionals.
In a multi-institutional study of a highly infectious disease like COVID-19, paperless consent for study participants is critical. One component of the COVID-19 Immune Response Study is a recruitment website with an IRB-approved and HIPAA-compliant electronic consent platform for enrolling patients.
In findings published in the journal Nature Communications, researchers show that cancer cells can take more than one path to reach a drug-resistant cell state. These findings could have promising implications for the future of cancer care.
Merck is collaborating with ISB and its partners to analyze blood samples and nasal swabs from Swedish Medical Center patients with SARS-CoV-2. Blood samples will be examined using proteomic, metabolomic, transcriptomics and genetic techniques to evaluate the impact of infection on different organs, and to identify potential biomarkers to predict the risk of severe disease.
ISB and Swedish Medical Center launched a study to follow hundreds of patients who contract COVID-19 to learn why those infected have drastically different outcomes. “Each of the COVID-19 patients has a unique lesson to teach us about how the medical and scientific community can respond most effectively to this pandemic,” said ISB President Dr. Jim Heath, who co-leads the study.
We created a new brand identity — including logo and tag line — to reflect ISB’s evolution since our inception in 2000, and ahead of our 20th anniversary. ISB is proud to be a part of the vibrant research community in Seattle, and is committed to translational and collaborative science.
Members of ISB’s Heath Lab and their collaborators have developed a way to sensitively detect and analyze neoantigen-specific T-cell populations from tumors and blood. This promising development may have implications for creating targeted, individual-specific cancer vaccines.
At ISB, many of our scientists and STEM professionals give their time and expertise and make profound impacts on our educational programs. Two of our researchers — Dr. Mónica Orellana and Dr. Nyasha Chambwe — were honored with inaugural Education Recognition Awards for their devotion to providing quality STEM education.
ISB President Dr. Jim Heath was included in Highly Cited Researchers 2018. The list is published by Clarivate Analytics, and recognizes “world-class researchers selected for their exceptional research performance, demonstrated by production of multiple highly cited papers that rank in the top 1 percent by citations for field and year in Web of Science.”
On Tuesday evening, ISB kicked off a brand new fundraising event called “Reimagine: A Night for Scientific Wellness, hosted by Chris and Barb Moe” It was a huge success — 60 guests gathered at The Collective, one of South Lake Union’s newest hot spots. Guests gathered to listen and learn from Drs. Lee Hood, Jim Heath and Sean Gibbons.
“Scientific wellness” should be widely adopted as a health strategy to avoid chronic illnesses and reduce health care costs, said ISB co-founder Dr. Lee Hood, speaking at the “Schrödinger at 75 conference” on the future of biology, in Dublin. Hood’s presentation was covered by The Irish Times.
Philanthropist Carole Ellison created the recently unveiled K. Carole Ellison Fellows in Bioinformatics. “It’s so exciting to be part of (young researchers’) lives and help them along in their careers,” Ellison said.
“Another vision for health care is emerging — one that is focused on wellness rather than disease; one that is proactive instead of reactive; one that takes a systems approach to biology and medicine rather than studying one gene, one cell or one protein at a time.” Read this Psychology Today story penned by ISB’s Lee Hood and Nathan Price.
Jim Heath took over as president of Institute for Systems Biology on January 1. To fully appreciate Heath’s relationship with ISB, you have to go back to its early days – shortly after the research organization was founded in 2000.
