PNNL

“Coronavirus” was Google’s second most-searched word in 2020. And there is a good chance some of those searchers landed on a research article by a Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) biomedical scientist.

A paper coauthored by PNNL coronavirus researcher Amy Sims was listed in the “2020 Top 50 SARS-CoV-2 Articles” by Nature Communications. It was one of the website’s 50 most-downloaded articles last year related to SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

Her paper and others on the list were recognized by the publication for highlighting “valuable research into the biology of coronavirus infection, its detection, treatment as well as into vaccine development and the epidemiology of the disease.”

Sims’s study, which has been accessed more than 99,000 times with nearly 800 citations, examined the efficacy of antiviral treatments for respiratory infections caused by coronaviruses, specifically the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV). She conducted the study with several colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before joining PNNL in January 2020.

Sims has published over 50 peer-reviewed publications on a range of topics, including antivirals that are efficacious against human coronaviruses. At PNNL, her research uses computational modeling and bioinformatics approaches to understand how coronaviruses manipulate host pathways and evade the immune response to replicate and spread. She also has a dual appointment with the University of Washington (UW) as affiliate associate professor in the UW School of Medicine.