The study led by the researcher Rossana Melo, from UFJF, has just been selected from among seven Brazilian projects that will be funded by the 2021 Lemann Brazil Research Fund. The goal of the awarded project is to investigate the roles played by eosinophils in the combat of the infection caused by Covid-19 in the human body.
Eosinophils are a type leukocytes, cells from the immune system responsible for defending the human organism, acting directly against the most diverse infectious agents. As the aggressive disease processes caused by Covid-19 are still poorly unknown to science, the research explores whether eosinophils play a major role in combating the viral replication in the body.
Rossana explains that previous studies have shown that eosinophils are responsible for generating antiviral actions against other viruses, such as H1N1. Furthermore, there are already some studies indicating that patients infected with Covid-19 in severe conditions have an extremely low number of eosinophils in their blood, while patients with milder cases of the disease have a higher concentration of these cells in the blood.
The project “Eosinophils: key innate immune cells in SARS-CoV-2 infection” is developed in partnership with Wendy Garrett, researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health and with the collaboration of Peter Weller, a researcher at the Harvard Medical School.
The result released by Harvard University highlights the excellence of the team and the project led by Rossana, a professor from the Laboratory of Cell Biology/ICB and a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School. The initiative received a contribution of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Through her postdoctoral studies at Harvard Medical School (2002-2005), Rossana established a solid partnership with researchers at the institution. She served from 2006 to 2019 as a visiting scientist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center / Harvard, Lecturer at Harvard Medical School (2019) and consultant on projects funded by the National Institutes of Health / NIH (2010-2020).
The approval of the project by the Lemann Foundation reinforces the continuity of the collaboration between Harvard University and the Federal University of Juiz de Fora, started twenty years ago by Professor Rossana and with collaborative studies that produced forty scientific papers.
The project, which has an initial continuance of two years with the prospect of an extension for the same time, also provides the creation of postdoctoral fellowships for the UFJF and will be developed, in most part, by the research group in Cell Biology at UFJF, which has extensive experience in the area of infectious diseases and eosinophil immunobiology. The project will also count on the collaboration of researchers from other Brazilian institutions such as UFRJ, UFMG and Fiocruz.
Original article published by UFJF (in Portuguese)