Interview with Dr. Sara Cherry: Tissue models of SARS-CoV-2 persistence and antiviral activity

Dr. Sara Cherry is the John W. Eckman Professor of Medical Science and a Professor of Microbiology in the Department of Microbiology at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania. She also is Scientific Director for the High-throughput Screening Core and Director of the Program for Chemogenomic Discovery in the Penn Center for Precision Medicine. Sara has decades of experience in the study of emerging viruses and the identification of antiviral strategies to control their activity. Her lab uses chemical and genetic screening technologies along with tissue models of human organ systems to determine how viral activity in different body sites can best be controlled by different pharmaceutical drugs. Since the COVID-19 pandemic started, Sara and team have used these technologies to identify combinations of antiviral or immunomodulatory drugs that best target SARS-CoV-2 infection in respiratory system models. Now, she is starting research that will use other models of human tissue - including from the GI tract, liver, blood vessels, even brain - to characterize SARS-CoV-2’s activity in these different locations and determine what drug combinations best target the virus.