Coronapod: What use are contact tracing apps? And new hopes for coronavirus drug remdesivir

Benjamin Thompson

Welcome to Coronapod.

Noah Baker

In this show, we’re going to bring you Nature’s take on the latest COVID-19 developments.

Benjamin Thompson

And we’ll be speaking to experts around the world about research during the pandemic.

Amy Maxmen

I really don’t know how this plays out. We also don’t know a ton about this virus, so there’s so many open questions. I just have a really hard time making predictions because I don’t know how the outbreak is going to change.

Benjamin Thompson

Welcome to episode seven of Coronapod. I’m Benjamin Thompson, coming to you once more from the South London basement, and I’m joined again by Noah Baker and Amy Maxmen. Amy, how are you doing today?

Amy Maxmen

Well, I can tell you what’s happening in California right now. We’ve had our social distancing measures extended till the end of May, but I can tell you from being here that they’re all kind of loosening up a little bit. People are having distancing barbecues and hanging out and going on walks and although it’s not officially opened up, I can feel that people who were really like, ‘I’m in it, I’m going to stay under lockdown,’ are sort of giving themselves a little bit of a longer leash than they have before.

Noah Baker

People did stick to lockdowns, but for a time, and I think here even you can see people are starting to loosen up, and the government is doubling down hard and its, ‘We’re almost there, don’t waste all of what we’ve done so far, please stay at home messaging,’ it’s just constant everywhere. It’s hard to keep up for this amount of time.

Benjamin Thompson

Yeah, I mean I guess, obviously, the concern is about the second peak, right, if we start going out again too soon. I’m yet to see any evidence of it but I guess that’s because people are still keeping themselves to themselves as best they can.

Noah Baker

One question that’s going to be asked a lot is how to control that potential second wave that could or couldn’t come, and one thing that’s being touted by a lot of people right now is the potential in contact tracing apps, so this way that we can allow people to move more freely because we can track their movements and we can lock down individuals very quickly and anyone that they might have come into contact with if they contract any symptoms, and they can do that via an app. There is differing opinions about how successful an app might be, and it’s one of the things we’re going to talk about this week on the show. Amy, I’m just interested, off the bat, contact tracing apps – yay or nay?

Amy Maxmen

I guess right now my thought is if you think that an app is going to solve this problem – nay. I should say, I think there’s a role for technology here, I just don’t think this is it. And I think what’s sort of interesting that happened this week is there was a letter sent from a few different former federal officials, both Republicans and Democrats in the US. There was the former head of the FDA, the former head of the CDC, the former head of Medicare and Medicaid, and they basically sent a letter to the White House and in it they laid out a plan for contact tracing. This is not app-based. It was a budget about what we’re going to need to open up the economy and to really roll out a full public health response, kind of what Jim Yong Kim talked about on our last podcast, and they were calling for US$46 billion, and I promise I’m going to get to the apps in a minute. But there’s a budget that set aside US$12 billion for contact tracing workforce, so this is to hire 180,000 people who will be involved with getting information about where somebody who tests positive is and keeping track of their close contacts, including monitoring them to see how they’re feeling, and also US$4.5 to set up isolation rooms for people who don’t have houses or don’t have houses that are big enough where they can self-isolate. And then there’s more money for income support for people who have to quarantine or isolate.

Noah Baker

That’s a reassuring and comprehensive plan from some fairly big voices in this field, but no mention of apps. That isn’t to say that they weren’t part of the story, though. One of the authors of the letter, Andy Slavitt, the former head of Medicare and Medicaid, did lay out his journey with regard to apps in a Twitter thread. What’s the background here?

Amy Maxmen

So, the backstory was, in early March, he hears contact tracing is going to be very important here, so he writes people he knows at Google and then gets in contact with Apple and they’re like, ‘Cool, this seems like a thing an app could do,’ right? It’s kind of a problem. It’s a networking issue. Phones should be able to do this, so he says, ‘Could you guys ever work together and do something with smartphones around this?’ They talk with each other, other kind of tech companies start thinking about it too, like SalesForce, and Apple and Google, which is kind of unprecedented, they worked together on an app that would kind of work through a Bluetooth connection where basically, anybody who downloads this app, if you get within some certain distance – I can’t remember offhand – some close distance of someone, there’s a record kept. ‘Person A is close to Person B’ and a record is made. And that way, if person A tests positive, everybody who has that app gets an alert: ‘You’re a contact.’

Benjamin Thompson

Okay, all sounds sensible. I can sense a ‘but’ coming, though. You’re going to pick this hope apart, aren’t you Amy?

Amy Maxmen

So, even in his Twitter thread on this, Andy Slavitt says, ‘Yay, technology!’ – that was his thought at the time – and then he says, ‘But I was lying to myself.’ Before they start doing all the things where you promote this app and tell everyone to download it and roll it out in health departments and all of that, there was a number of surveys done, and the surveys found even optimistically, something around 40% of Americans would download this app, and there’s some reasons for that. One of them is mistrust – people are already worried about tech companies following them around, so now people are leery about downloading an app that’s going to contain a record of your information. And some people don’t have smartphones. And there’s some people that just don’t like downloading apps. If I think especially about some of my older relatives, it’s really hard to get them to, say, download WhatsApp so I can even communicate with them when I’m out of the country. Forget like an app that they don’t really get anything out of. So, that wasn’t really maybe the best plan because a lot of people aren’t going to even use it.

Noah Baker

When it comes to contact tracing apps, I can completely understand, I think as you kind of alluded to as well, Amy, why people would think okay, we are in a scenario where we need to find out who’s been where and keep track of a lot of people. You can understand why every tech company in the world went, ‘Well, that’s exactly what a phone can do. That’s what we do every day as we track where people are.’ Have you seen Google Maps? The ability to do that, technologically, is there. I just feel like although the tech possibility is there, people haven’t done enough thinking about the social science side of this. You’ve got to get people to agree to use the clever tech to make it worth anything, and that’s a big step.

Benjamin Thompson

In terms of tech, I don’t know about both of you but I’m someone who religiously turns off his Bluetooth to try and save battery. I will close unused apps. Maybe I’m n=1 here, but if it’s not being used, it gets closed, and just from a purely technical perspective, it seems like these are some of the hurdles that need to be overcome. These things need to be able to work all of the time when you’re out to do anything at all.

Amy Maxmen

What’s kind of funny is that I’ve written stories from various other countries, reporting when people come up with a cool tech solution to solve a problem. The people making these tech solutions are very well meaning, but there’s a constant kind of traditional failure of the people who are the technologists and talking to the anthropologists and talking to the public health people and talking to the epidemiologists, and you kind of need all of those people to talk about it. I wrote a feature last year or the year before that was about using location data from phones to see how people might be spreading malaria, and there was an instance in southeast Asia. I went to north-eastern Cambodia when I was reporting that and I was talking to man and I was like, ‘Would you accept a way to be tracked through your phone?’ And he just laughed really hard because he’s like, ‘We don’t take phones with us. Where are you going to plug them in when you’re camping in the woods?’ Had the tech people talked to the people who are working in these areas, they might have realised this is not really a great solution.

Benjamin Thompson

And yet, governments around the world are getting very, very excited about these apps. I tried to find a list of them today and there are dozens of them, yet it seems there’s very little actual evidence as to whether they actually are effective at all, right? We have a leader in Nature, a leader article that talks about Singapore, but the numbers we’ve run, the potential of two people to bump into each other and have their Bluetooth connection happen is only a 4% chance of that happening, and there needs to be blanket coverage of these things for them to do anything at all, if they actually work, right?

Amy Maxmen

Exactly, and I think I saw some numbers in a Washington Post piece that said a fifth of people in Singapore downloaded that app, and then in Australia it was 8% downloaded their contact tracing app, so it doesn’t work unless everyone has it. And maybe if I was in a tech company I might say, ‘Okay, yeah, it’s just a matter of scaling. We’ve got to really promote it. We’ve got to make it fun. We’ve got to game-ify it. We got to make it social.’ I don’t know actually. I don’t work at a tech company so I don’t know what they’re thinking. Every week we delay, the number of cases is going to double, and the number of contacts of those cases gets even bigger and bigger, so where do we want to put our time?

Noah Baker

Another example that’s been flagged a lot of times by people when they’re saying contact tracing apps can work is South Korea, which utilised technology quite heavily in their response, and they used contact tracing software but it wasn’t really an app in the same way as this. The technology they used to contact trace involved what I think a lot of people might consider to be quite significant invasions of privacy. They used CCTV records and, in some cases, even credit card transactions. These all got put together into a model to be able to trace where people had been and then send that on, and importantly, it wasn’t just that there was technology working, it was people using some very powerful technology which potentially had some privacy concerns.

Amy Maxmen

Yeah, that’s a great point. There’s no way around this being a totally private thing. I know that’s something that Massachusetts had to work closely with in figuring out their contact tracing programme because it’s sort of an invasion. I mean maybe I want to keep private that I’m a positive case, so there’s some invasion of privacy that happens. My gut feeling is people might be a little bit more open to like one person kind of managing this data and calling versus downloading an app that’s going to follow a lot of your transactions. And then there’s also the question of, okay, let’s say people do download this thing and I get an alert on my phone – ‘Oh, hey, I was close to someone,’ – what if I don’t really know who that person is or what I should do next. Can I go to the grocery store or not? I’m not really sure. Whereas a human calling me who might explain the situation, it might feel a little bit more private and they could also advise me on various questions. ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve been shopping for my 90-year-old next-door neighbour, can I continue to do that?’ So, there’s sort of this human element that might be really important here.

Noah Baker

And then, of course, there is the concern that if someone has an app, they may think, well, we don’t need to do the human bit then because we’ve got a computer doing it for us, which is another huge worry with putting too many eggs in the contact tracing app basket.

Amy Maxmen

Completely, because if you’re going to do this whole effort, the whole idea is to track the chain of transmission and then put a stop to it while somebody quarantines or isolates so that you’ve put a stop to that chain of transmission, and so If it’s only working 16% of the time, which is one measure of effectiveness that Andy Slavitt came to, that’s a lot of wasted effort because people are going to have to market this thing, talking to health departments, getting them to weave it into their response. There is a cost to doing all of this while cases are mounting, and I guess I just want to say I don’t want to say all tech is bad because when I’m reporting, I see that there are places where technology maybe could be helpful, like just collecting tons of information on these are a person’s ten contacts and you might want to keep in touch with them for the 14 days of incubation. This is when they start to have a fever. This is when they’re tested and when you might want to contact their contacts. This is a ton of data, so I can imagine a big role for simpler-to-use software could be really important there. I’ve heard a lot about electronic health record systems in reporting of testing information. I feel like those are software challenges. So, it’s not to say that software has no role to play, but just pretending that it alone is going to do what human contact tracers could is maybe a mistake.

Noah Baker

One other thing that was mentioned in the editorial that was in Nature this week is that in this context, the apps that people are talking about, they’re essentially medical interventions here. They’re public health interventions, and interventions that have an impact on people’s health, they go through quite a lot of rounds of testing before they’re rolled out to everyone.

Amy Maxmen

Yeah, that’s interesting. It is true. It’s totally true, and I think, well, the way a lot of apps or tech works is it gets beta tested, right? You kind of roll it out and you tweak it as it needs to be tweaked, and that’s a great model. It’s a really cool model, but maybe it’s not good enough or fast enough when we’re in the middle of an outbreak.

Noah Baker

Yeah, I think the UK NHS’ app, their specific one that they’re developing, they’re saying in a couple of weeks they’re hoping it will be ready to start testing in a local area first. So, again, that’s a beta test of sorts. But importantly, if that happens, that needs to be the only app people are using because again, we can’t have some people using one app and other people using another app. It’s kind of an all-or-nothing situation here.

Amy Maxmen

I wonder what this is all going to look like. We should revisit this in like, I don’t know, a month and a half or something, June?

Noah Baker

Yeah, yeah, for sure. We’ve been discussing the potential success of these apps and whether or not they will be tested appropriately and what they might do, but one thing this week that’s been announced is the results of some of the early tests of remdesivir – a drug that we’ve talked about quite a lot on this podcast. Amy, tell us what’s going on with remdesivir.

Amy Maxmen

Yesterday, there were a few studies and early reports that have come out from various remdesivir trials. One of them was at a press briefing where Anthony Fauci announced some early results of the trial. This clinical trial included more than 1,000 people, and it found that people who were given remdesivir – and they were all people who had severe COVID – they recovered in 11 days on average compared to 15 on average for those on a placebo. And he couched this, when he gave this press briefing, he gave it in very careful terms, and what he said is although a 31% improvement doesn’t seem like a knockout, it’s a very important proof of concept. This is good news. It’s not bad news. It’s good news and those four days make a difference if you’re on a ventilator or something like that. If every single person that’s on a ventilator takes a lot of care, it’s a big toll on the health system, so if someone can get out sooner, that’s great. If it were me, I would want that. I would want to get out. That’s really excellent. It’s definitely not going to be our silver bullet here that’s going to fix this thing.

Noah Baker

And remdesivir is a drug. Fundamentally, the way that it works is that it clogs up an enzyme that viruses like the coronavirus use to replicate, which is, I think, what Fauci was referring to when he said it’s a proof of principal. Drugs that work in this way are drugs that might be able to work going forward, which opens up lots of possibilities not just for other drugs but also for tweaking the way that remdesivir is applied, and there are protocols that can change the effectiveness of this drug and so there’s more that could come from that drug as well.

Amy Maxmen

There was also a report out of China from their clinical trial, and I think the warning there is that there seems like there was more adverse events in the group that was on remdesivir, and 18 people were taken off of remdesivir earlier than they were expected to be because of some adverse events. So, there is some possibility of side effects here that need to be looked into. This is all early results and you want to do statistics on it and all of that.

Noah Baker

There’s a lot of discussion now about what the next drugs are going to be. There are people looking into combination therapies for HIV and seeing if they might be able to work because having one antiviral drug that does something positive is good, but realistically, you want four or five or six drugs that you can use so you can cycle through them or adjust them based on reactions of individual people, not least, also, so you lower the risk of antiviral resistance, which is something that could be developed, and so remdesivir certainly isn’t going to be the silver bullet. There are more antivirals on the way as well as other treatments that are still being trialled, like chloroquine.

Amy Maxmen

Yeah, and then I think maybe the next wave we’re going to see in another month or two months, we’ll start hearing more about these antibody-based treatments. So, in the meantime, researchers have been harvesting antibodies from people who’ve recovered, and also there’s some groups that are isolating antibodies in other ways, like from humanised mice and things like that, and the idea is to make drugs that sort of mimic these antibodies, and either its one type of antibody – a monoclonal – or you’ll have a cocktail of antibodies, so that might be a later wave of treatments. And for the Ebola outbreak in DRC, they actually trialled remdesivir and also another antiviral, they trialled that against a couple of antibody-based therapies, and the antibody-based therapies ended up working better so maybe that’s what we’ll start seeing later this year.

Benjamin Thompson

Well, let’s round things off again once more. Let’s talk about our one good thing, once more, that we’ve seen or heard in the last seven days that’s kind of been maybe a little ray of sunshine in all this. I think, Amy, it must be your turn to go first this week. What have you got for us?

Amy Maxmen

One thing – I just saw this right before our podcast – is I saw that there was a new survey out of almost 23,000 individuals across the US, and it’s asking Americans kind of about their opinions and feelings right now, and I thought there was a couple of things that are, I guess, maybe bright spots in all of this. So, 58% of all Americans say they have a lot of trust in scientists and research right now, and if you also include an additional 35% who also have some trust, not a lot, but some trust in scientists and researchers, that adds up to 93%. That’s actually really high. Even 58% is really high. I’ve been looking at Pew polls from 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and there traditionally, usually, is only about, say, like 30%-ish of Americans who have a high amount of trust in scientists, so this is actually a lot, and to me that’s really good news. Maybe it’s not shocking that there’s not so much trust in the media – 9% of people have a lot of trust in the media right now.

Noah baker

Wow. That is very low.

Benjamin Thompson

Wow indeed.

Amy Maxmen

That’s very low.

Noah Baker

It’s a strange position to be in for us, as people that are journalists working in the media but the science media where we’re trying to speak for and to scientists. Where do we sit between that 93% and that 9%? I’m not quite sure.

Amy Maxmen

I know, it’s very true, to get lumped in with everyone else. On the one hand, of course, I was like sad about that. But on the other hand, gosh, I have to be honest, sometimes I see things on TV news and I just completely cringe, so maybe it’s partly good that people aren’t putting all… I’d rather people put their faith in science almost right now than all of the media because there’s a lot of bad media right now.

Noah Baker

That’s a good call.

Benjamin Thompson

Noah, what about you? What’s seen you through the week, this week?

Noah Baker

I have to say, I’m continuing to look inwards for my one good thing. So, normally, I live in London on a narrowboat, and I’ve had to move off my beloved narrowboat and leave it with some friends and come to where I am right now, and the reason for that is so that I can keep doing this. It’s very, very hard to produce a podcast from a narrowboat, and so I needed to do that so that I could continue to work. But the advantage of being away from my lovely boat is that I have a large kitchen here, and so I have been doing things that I’ve always wanted to do but not been able to do on my boat. So, I have been making tofu and I have been making yoghurt and things that take a lot of space and need sterilising, which is quite tricky to do on a very small narrowboat. And my partner has been able to build a darkroom and they’ve just developed their very first roll of film, which is very exciting. So, we’re taking advantage of the situation we’re in to achieve some things we’ve wanted to achieve for a long time, so that’s making me happy this week.

Amy Maxmen

That sounds awesome. Homemade yoghurt – that’s cool.

Noah Baker

It’s super easy.

Amy Maxmen

Wow.

Benjamin Thompson

Microbiology fun, right? Anyway, right, well, I’ve got one then to round things off, and for the benefit of the listeners then, we record this at about 7 o’clock UK time, but at 8 o’clock on a Thursday, everybody in the UK – or at least as far as I’m aware – has been going out and really showing their appreciation for medical staff and frontline healthcare workers by clapping and banging their pots. I think we spoke about it once before on the podcast, and what I did last week, so shortly after recording last week’s show, was go out and record what that actually sounds like, and it’s quite something. Let me play it to you both. Hang on, one second.

Clapping and cheering

Benjamin Thompson

There’s people up and down the street. They’re hanging out of balconies. They’re banging on stuff. And it was nice to be part of something and just to try and show our appreciation for the people who are looking after those who have been sickened by this virus, so thanks to one and all of them, of course.

Amy Maxmen

That’s great.

Noah Baker

Yeah, it’s so strange how in a time of isolation, community seems to be emerging all over the place even though people can’t talk to each other in the way they normally can.

Benjamin Thompson

Well, let’s all three of us keep talking, please. Why don’t you both join me in seven days and we’ll carry on with episode eight of Coronapod. Amy and Noah, thank you so much for joining me.

Amy Maxmen

Thank you.

Noah Baker

Thanks Ben.

Benjamin Thompson

More from Noah and Amy next week. Next up on this episode of Coronapod, reporter Adam Levy has spoken to three researchers from very different disciplines who are making the most of the ongoing lockdown.

Adam Levy

The COVID-19 outbreak has turned our worlds upside down, shutting down activities we once took for granted. For some researchers, though, this is opening up new opportunities. Of course, virologists and epidemiologists are scrambling to understand the virus, but researchers from other disciplines are making use of the lockdown in different ways. I caught up with a few of them to find out what they’ve been working on. One is geophysics PhD student Celeste Labedz from the California Institute of Technology in the US. She’s been marvelling as the world gets quieter… literally.

Celeste Labedz

So, there’s always seismic background noise going on. No matter where you are, the ground is moving just a little bit. Not enough that you could feel it like you can feel an earthquake, but just a little bit of motion. A lot of those sources are natural, so a lot of our seismic background noise comes from things like the ocean, but you can also have manmade sources of seismic noise. So, that’s where we’ve seen the change. So, there’s less cars on the road, so there’s less vibration from cars. There’s less industry because people are working from home, so I’ve been looking at seismometers in downtown Los Angeles. Now, yeah, it’s half the power it used to be, which is really wild.

Adam Levy

And you’re not the only person to see something like this, right?

Celeste Labedz

Yeah, there’s seismologists all around the world who have been checking this out. Basically, anywhere where there’s human activity and that human activity has decreased due to COVID, you can see the change.

Adam Levy

Now, is there anything we can actually hope to learn from this rather than just seeing that it is taking place?

Celeste Labedz

The main thing that might come out of this is that we can detect smaller earthquakes. Small earthquakes can help us understand faults in our area. So, in southern California, there’s a lot of faults, and there are tiny earthquakes on them every single day, and if we had to wait for only big earthquakes to understand where the faults are and how they’re moving and stuff, we wouldn’t have very much data. But when we can use tiny earthquakes too then that gives us a lot more options just to see kind of where and how things are moving.

Adam Levy

Of course, everyone is getting used in different ways to the new structure around our lives. How does it feel for a part of that, for you, to be trying to take on new research that, I suppose, has to be done now in order to understand what’s going on?

Celeste Labedz

It’s kind of comforting because we’re all in really uncertain times and most of us don’t have expertise in the thing that is making us all stressed out right now, but the fact that this is something relevant to this whole situation that I actually can use my expertise for is really kind of nice. That’s comforting.

Adam Levy

Celeste Labedz isn’t the only researcher making the most of these quieter times. Physicist Alessandro Farini from the National Institute of Optics in Florence is harnessing the free time that many of his fellow Italians have on their hands. He’s kicked off a citizen science experiment into light pollution that’s communicating key lessons about the scientific method.

Alessandro Farini

In Italy, a lot of people go to balcony in order, for example, to sing, in order to stay together because in Italy the lockdown is very strict, very severe. So, our idea was, is it possible to do science on a balcony? So, our idea was, okay, is it possible to measure lighting using our smartphones?

Adam Levy

Why is this something you would want to do? What’s the use for seeing what the lighting is like on the balcony?

Alessandro Farini

If too much light arrives on your balcony inside your house, this probably can create stress and so on. It’s very interesting to have these results from 10,000 measurements from a lot of parts of Italy. In towns and especially in big towns, for example, the level of light is higher than, for example, in small towns.

Adam Levy

Now, have you had any feedback from the participants? Have they written in to tell you what the experiment means to them and to their lives in quarantine?

Alessandro Farini

Yeah, especially teachers. So, teachers, they say to us, ‘This experiment was a great help for us in order to explain to our students what science is.’ The first result is not data. The first result is the fact that a lot of people have to think about science. During a pandemic emergency, the idea that science is very important, very beautiful, is probably the best result we can achieve.

Adam Levy

Alessandro Farini there. Other citizen science projects are underway too, from tracking plastic waste to spotting spider monkeys in drone footage. But some researchers are taking the time many of us now have because of the coronavirus pandemic and using it to help fight the coronavirus. At least, that’s Brian Koepnick’s plan. He’s a biochemist from the University of Washington in Seattle in the US, and one of the brains behind Foldit – a computer game where players manipulate amino acid chains to find their folded structure. Last year, the Foldit team published a paper in Nature, showing that crowdsourced skills could even design completely novel proteins, although these weren’t targeted at a particular function. It’s these design skills that Brian is hoping could be especially useful in 2020.

Brian Koepnick

We use Foldit to crowdsource some of the research that we do in protein structure prediction and design, so these are research problems that focus on how proteins fold up into their three-dimensional shapes.

Adam Levy

And why is this something that you’d want to do in a kind of crowdsourced way rather than researchers doing it themselves or getting a computer to do it maybe using some kind of artificial intelligence, say?

Brian Koepnick

What we find is that humans have some intuition in 3D spatial reasoning that seems to help with these problems, and we find that Foldit players can come up with inventive new solutions to problems that our computer algorithms cannot.

Adam Levy

And have you seen a change in involvement levels or enthusiasm or strategies or anything like that with the current lockdowns taking place around the world?

Brian Koepnick

So, we’ve had a huge influx in new users. I think in March alone we saw over 47,000 new users join Foldit and puzzle participation has been through the roof, so we have lots of people coming together to play Foldit and help fight the coronavirus problem.

Adam Levy

Yeah, exactly what are you hoping to be able to achieve with Foldit at the moment?

Brian Koepnick

So, our aim in Foldit right now is to develop protein therapeutics for COVID-19. So, we have two approaches right now. One is an antiviral. We are trying to design a protein that could be used to block how the virus infects humans. The second approach is an anti-inflammatory protein therapeutic, so this would be a protein drug that you might administer to people with severe COVID-19 who are facing respiratory failure.

Adam Levy

And how far could Foldit actually take us in this direction?

Brian Koepnick

These are the very first steps of the drug design process, so even if Foldit players come up with something brilliant tomorrow, those drug designs still have to undergo a lot of testing, right, so this is not something that will save us from coronavirus next month.

Adam Levy

How big a break from, I suppose, convention would it be if one of these did end up being a drug that could be given to people who had coronavirus?

Brian Koepnick

Protein design is very young as a drug development effort, so this is definitely brand new territory for the science, but Foldit players have surprised us in the past, so we wouldn’t be surprised if they come up with something extraordinary.

Adam Levy

Now, when I’ve heard of Foldit before, I’ve heard of it investigating often, I suppose, more theoretical or at least less urgent questions than the coronavirus pandemic. Does it feel strange to be researching in this context with Foldit?

Brian Koepnick

Well, everything feels a little bit strange right now. For a while now we’ve been looking forward to aiming Foldit at applied problems that could have real impact. We have seen that a lot of people are really driven to work on COVID-19 puzzles right now, which is heartening to see the community come together.

Adam Levy

And for you, personally, how does it feel to be taking this thing that you’ve worked on over the years and be applying it to a problem of this magnitude?

Brian Koepnick

We kind of had plans to start tackling similar problems and coronavirus kind of took us by surprise, so we’ve been kind of flying by the seat of our pants and doing what we can, but it’s really invigorating to work on such an urgent problem, that’s for sure.

Benjamin Thompson

Brian Koepnick from the University of Washington in Seattle there. If you’re interested to find out more about Foldit, you can find a link to it in this week’s show notes. So, that’s it for episode seven of Coronapod. But before I leave you, a little bit of good news. One of our episodes of the regular Nature Podcast has been nominated for a Webby Award, which of course we’re all very excited about, and this episode features the science of foot callouses, the field of protein archaeology and a chat between me and Amy who was on location in the Democratic Republic of the Congo reporting on the Ebola outbreak there. Now, in addition to the judge’s vote, we’re also up for a People’s Voice Award, which is voted on by listeners, and we’d of course love it if you could vote for us. So, if you’ve got a couple of spare minutes, I’ll put a link to the voting page and a link to the episode we’re nominated for in this week’s show notes. Look out for another edition of the Nature Podcast on Wednesday, and we’ll be back again next Friday with episode eight of Coronapod. Until then, I’ve been Benjamin Thompson. Stay safe.