Autoimmune Life Blog

BRI’s newest principal investigator, Carmen Mikacenic, MD, is used to working with dangerous pathogens. Still, when she started studying aspects of COVID-19, she took extra precautions.

We asked members of our community to share how they’ve adapted to life during the pandemic, and to offer advice on how to stay healthy, positive and resilient. Here’s what they had to say.

One goal is to find markers that identify why some people with the virus don’t have symptoms while others get fatally ill. The sickest patients tend to have multiple health issues, which makes it hard to pinpoint the factors related to COVID-19.

BRI scientists were sure of one thing when the novel coronavirus struck: They had the expertise to make swift progress toward understanding it and finding better treatments. “Studying how the immune system responds to viruses has been part of our work for years,” says BRI’s President Jane Buckner

COVID-19 has put a therapy called hydroxychloroquine in the spotlight — and, at the same time, shrouded it in confusion.

In a time when an online search for “COVID-19 information” produces an astonishing 38 million hits, deciding where to get your facts from can feel overwhelming. There is a staggering amount of commentary out there, but whose news can you trust?

In the 1980s, Ronda Palmer constantly felt tired and had far too many aches and pains for a teenager.

With a newly awarded $4 million grant from The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, BRI and SCRI will now focus on using their novel approach to generate an engineered T cell product that can be used in a future first-in-human clinical trial.

With more than 30 Virginia Mason team members and BRI researchers collaborating, research is happening at an unprecedented pace to help combat the COVID-19 public health crisis.

Many people who live with autoimmune diseases are feeling even more anxiety because their disease may put them at higher risk for complications if infected with COVID-19 – which also creates barriers to necessities like leaving the house, grocery shopping and getting medications.