Episode 39: Lavanya Visvabharathy - T cell memory dysfunction in Long Covid

Lavanya Visvabharathy is incredibly busy.  As a Postdoctoral Fellow at North Western University, she has been working with the Long Covid Clinic, running multiple studies, whilst also suffering from both Rheumatoid Arthritis and Long Covid.  She has applied her expertise in T cell immunology and knowledge of autoimmunity to research the mechanisms of Long Covid.

“So the hypothesis that I had here was that Long Covid patients seem to have this constellation of symptoms that were resembling some kind of immune disturbance. So I thought that if we actually looked at underlying T cell responses to the virus, we could find a pattern that differentiated these patients from those who completely recovered after. As an immunologist, it kind of screamed let's look at the T cell response.”

In her search for answers Lavanya is not afraid of experimenting on herself. Collating the results of this, and the data from the numerous Long Covid patients at North Western, Visvabharathy found a number of functional alterations in the T cell compartment associated with Long Covid, that might suggest a persistent infection. She has done extensive research into the T cell response to COVID-19 vaccination.  The work she is currently doing is based around these thoughts.

Visvabharathy also gives us a glimpse into how hard it is to navigate funding for the studies into Long Covid with some very candid insights into the hoops one has to go through to get grants from the NIH even if you work within a big institution like North Western.

This is a fast paced interview contains a lot of detailed information - we would suggest it might be worth listening to twice.