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JOHNSON CITY — Dr. Jonathan Moorman of East Tennessee State University was recently awarded a $330,000 Biomedical Laboratory Research and Development Merit Review Award by the Department of Veterans Affairs to study immune responses to COVID-19. 
The project, “Characterizing trained immune responses to COVID-19,” was one of 18 funded studies awarded from a pool of 104 applications received from VA Medical Centers across the country.
“The new project’s goals are to determine the importance of innate immune responses in responding to repeat exposure to viral antigens following COVID-19 recovery and identify ‘trained’ innate immune memory responses to SARS CoV-2 antigens following COVID-19 recovery,” Moorman said.
Moorman’s study will be the second major study to utilize a biorepository that was established by ETSU and the James H. Quillen Veterans Affairs Medical Center at Mountain Home. The biorepository contains blood samples from patients who have recovered from COVID-19. These samples are frozen and cryopreserved and can be used in multiple studies.
Moorman is a professor and division chief of Infectious, Inflammatory and Immunologic Disease in the ETSU Quillen College of Medicine’s Department of Internal Medicine. He is a co-director of the ETSU Center of Excellence in Inflammation, Infectious Disease, and Immunity and a member of Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee’s Coronavirus Task Force.
If you are at least 14 days recovered from COVID-19 and would like to donate to the biorepository to assist with current and future coronavirus research, visit www.etsu.edu/com/ciidi/ for more information.