3 Questions: Michael Yaffe on treating Covid-19 patients with acute respiratory distress
During the Covid-19 pandemic, frontline health care workers have had to adapt rapidly to treating patients with lung failure, not only because of shortages of equipment such as ventilators often used to treat severe cases, but also because such approaches are not always effective due to the unique and still imperfectly understood pathology of Covid-19 infections. Michael Yaffe, the David H. Koch Professor in Science, normally divides his time among his roles as a researcher and professor of biology and biological engineering at MIT, an intensivist/trauma surgeon at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), and a colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve Medical Corps. Currently, he is developing treatments for Covid-19 infections in his laboratory at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. Additionally, he runs one of the Covid-19 Intensive Care Units at BIDMC and serves as co-director of the acute care and ICU section of Boston...