New Fort Worth medical school leading local effort to treat coronavirus
When creation of the TCU and UNTHSC School of Medicine was first announced, there was great anticipation about what it would mean for our community.
As medical school candidates now are vying for spots in our third class, we see some of the possibilities realized. They include addressing the severe physician shortage in Texas, expanding graduate medical education and producing the compassionate physicians we all covet.
And while the COVID-19 pandemic has presented unprecedented challenges, it also illustrates how a new medical school can collaborate with our strong partners in North Texas to address needs right here in our own community.
The vast majority of discoveries in medicine occur within a few miles of an academic medical center. Together with our clinical partners, biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, we can drive advances in medicine and attract industry to our community.
These opportunities, blended with other attributes of the school and its partnerships, resulted in an expected initial economic impact of $4 billion a year by 2030.
While work is being done worldwide on the coronavirus, several physicians and scientists affiliated with our medical school believed that our experience in Fort Worth could offer significant contributions to understanding and ultimately tackling this challenging pandemic.
We organized community physicians from different medical institutions across the city to create the Fort Worth Clinical Sciences Working Group for COVID-19. Members were recruited based on their clinical, scientific and leadership backgrounds to enhance meaningful collaboration.
In at least 40 virtual meetings since April, we refined this proposal to explore and develop additional hypotheses and questions, resulting in five original research studies. Even with hope and anticipation for vaccines to help stem this virus, we still have at least several months for the infectivity and morbidity of COVID-19 to stress society, our community and our health care systems.
We submitted the first of these studies to the Food and Drug Administration for regulatory review through the Institutional Review Board of the Baylor Scott and White Health System, and we’ll use this same process with other major hospitals in Fort Worth.
The first three studies aim to treat the “SARS-COV2 Cytokine Storm” (the overactive immune response) with commercially available monoclonal antibodies targeting specific components of the immune system. The fourth will investigate a novel treatment for COVID-19 blood clotting events. A fifth creates a city wide bio-registry of COVID-19 cases that will invite future collaborative, hypothesis-driven work.
We developed a formal infrastructure for the working group, cultivated key donor relationships to secure initial funding, developed robust relationships with industry partners in the immuno-therapeutic and genomics fields, and recently entered into collaboration with international academic partners.
We are passionately committed to help advance treatments for COVID-19 patients. Our new medical school formed this diverse team across the city to stimulate scientific and clinical collaborations.
If we improve or save one life, we will have accomplished our goal and, we hope, inspired physicians across our country and beyond to collaborate in a scientifically rigorous manner to benefit their regions.