[stevenbedrick]

Without getting into the question of what it means for the pandemic to be "over", I think it's relevant to point out that at least some of the cancelled grants are not studying COVID per se, but rather are studying things relevant to preparing for the next pandemic. Jeremy Berg (a former director of NIGMS) has some commentary, and mentions that the AVIDD program was among those that were terminated: https://bsky.app/profile/jeremymberg.bsky.social/post/3lla4k...

This was a large program that funded general research into antiviral drugs- again, in preparation for next time.

Going on the experience of the last couple of weeks, and what we have seen in terms of grant and program terminations, I would not be surprised if they did a big grep for the substring "COVID" and used that as their starting point for finding things to cut, without actually paying attention to what the grants were really studying.

[baja_blast]

I really wish more research was funneled into vaccines that target T-cells instead of B cells which produce antibodies. You see viruses mutate quickly and antibodies produced by the b cells can be evaded pretty quickly, but T-cells the white blood cells that actually eat the viruses are far more adaptable.

[amy_petrik]

B cell antibodies are a the B cell receptor. T cell antibodies are the T cell receptor, which is just an antibody attached to the T-cell (in simplistic terms of a complex system). There are other tradeoffs. B-cell antibodies have a much larger "state space" of combinatorics; but are not active in little babbies unlike T-cells which are. I think you're thinking of more of the innate immune system, more like macrophages and neutrophils and such, and yea it would be interesting to figure something that engages those.. such as exogenous antibodies.

The other aspect we need to research new pandemics is a model virus organism, antivirals alone are insufficient. For example, if we're worried some bug is surely on the verge of jumping from say, a horse with equine encephalitis virus, to human, it would be important to develop a model of the virus, under highly precautious and sterile conditions of course, whereby our modified model virus would become proficient at infecting human cells and thusly our antivirals may be researched easily. After all, to cure our hypothetical pandemic disease it's important to have a disease to cure in the first place.