I'm so
fortunate - dare I say, blessed
to have 21 of the most talented students
in the world in my lab,
we do what's called multidimensional data analysis
in which we can take clinical data and biochemical data
and metabolomics data and genomics data.
And we can put it all together and we can make sense of it.
The hard thing right now in science
is making sense of so much complexity.
This transdisciplinary approach
was critical to our COVID findings.
My name is Dr. Ski Chilton
I'm the director of the Precision
Nutrition and Wellness Initiative here
at the University of Arizona.
(chatter)
When the pandemic broke out,
we realized that we could examine patterns,
molecular patterns, that might be different
between mild and severe and those individuals who died.
[Ski] Do we know what that compound is?
[Student] The data are actually very interesting.
[Ski] And when we look for those patterns,
we saw evidence for this enzyme that I'd studied
25 years ago called
We then went and looked and sure enough,
we saw the highest levels that have ever been seen in humans
circulating in those individuals who died of COVID.
[Ski] So you say you're shooting for 1.7?
[Student] Yeah, 1.7 to 1.8.
[Ski] So 25 years ago, when we were looking at this enzyme,
we were looking at its role
in initiating inflammatory responses.
There became more and more evidence
that this enzyme was playing a critical role in human
defense against, in particular, bacterial infections .
And if it sees membranes which are around all cells as foreign,
it will completely shred those membranes.
So the surprise in COVID was
when levels get to be this high, it turns on the host,
it turns on the organs and plays a pivotal role
we believe in causing the death from COVID.
So now I'm working with some of the largest
global operations in the world to take inhibitors
to this enzyme and put them in clinical trials.
And it's a good chance that those clinical trials
would start in Africa.
They would start in places where the vaccination
rates are 2%
and they desperately need specific therapies.
My other passion is Africa.
For the last decade, we've been in Sudan.
We were in Darfur when 2 million people were killed to genocide
during Darfur.
We were able to build a runway,
bring in tons and tons of supplies.
And most recently, we built a hospital,
one of two hospitals in the whole South Kordofan
region, a region the size of Georgia.
The first time I had gone to Darfur,
a mother brings me a four year old child
that weighed 11 pounds. And this four year old child,
the mother is saying, "Please keep that child alive."
For the next month
I was on a SAT phone with the neonatal intensive care
unit at Wake Forest, and we kept that child alive.
That child is right there in that picture.
That child's name is Abuk. And every time
I went to Darfur after that, I would find Abuk
and I was forever changed by that.
I tell
scientists who come into my lab
that this is not science.
This is social justice.
In all cases, there is a consistent theme
of helping the people who are most
persecuted.
Clearly, what we've discovered here,
what we've been fortunate enough to find with this
transdisciplinary team, is by far the most important thing
I've ever done, maybe 100 1000 times more important.
What I love to think that I work for and accomplish
is to love the world,
and that has been able to be done through my science,
my work in Africa, my books, and that seems to be the driver.
But everything else has just been a miracle.