A team in the lab of James Gern, MD, including co-investigators Christine Seroogy, MD, Daniel Jackson, MD, and Sima Ratnamam, MD, was recently awarded a supplement to their ongoing U19 grant from the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (NIH/NIAID). This supplement related to the COVID-19 pandemic is entitled, “Human epidemiology and response to SARS-CoV-2 (HEROS),” and builds on the lab’s ongoing work to support the participation of the Wisconsin Infant Study Cohort (WISC) and Childhood Origins of Asthma (COAST) birth cohort studies in the (HEROS) study. Their award is for $210,585 award over 9 months.
Under a separate NIH award led by Daniel Jackson, MD, his team was awarded $794,085 over 8 months to support the participation of the Inner City Asthma Consortium (ICAC3) in the HEROS project. HEROS is a surveillance study to determine the prevalence of SARS-CoV2 infection (detection of virus in nasal secretions) over time in children and their household contacts (caregivers and siblings). In addition to the need for surveying children for asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection, this study will allow a comparison between children with asthma and other atopic conditions and children without those conditions. For the overall project, the goal across eleven cites is to rapidly reenroll 6,000 families across the U.S. in the study. The link to the full article is here: https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2020/05/10/national-pandemic-study-includes-state-families/