COVER STORY {by karen werner } Let’s Go Let’s Go Save Some Save Some Lives Lives ASU PIVOTS TO FIGHT COVID-19 24 FRONTDOORS MEDIA | MAY 2 020 Photos courtesy of Arizona State University.

In late January, when an Arizona State University student was diagnosed with Arizona’s first case of the novel coronavirus, our state woke up to the realities of COVID-19. Arizona was not well prepared to deal with the threat. Testing nationwide was limited, plagued by shortages of testing kits and reagents. ASU President Michael Crow was faced with having 90,000 students and no medical school. How could he make sure students could get testing if they needed it? Dr. Joshua LaBaer had an idea. LaBaer is one of the country’s premier investigators in the field of personalized diagnostics. Formerly the founder and director of the Harvard Institute of Proteomics, he was recruited to ASU’s Biodesign Institute as the first Virginia G. Piper Chair of Personalized Medicine in 2009 and is the executive director of the Biodesign Institute today. LaBaer realized he had a secret weapon at his disposal: his lab’s previous contract with the Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA. As part of that $39 million project, LaBaer’s team had developed a diagnostic assay for assessing exposure to radiation. “Imagine if a nuclear bomb went off in a major American city and civilians were exposed to gamma radiation. There would not be an easy way to determine who had been exposed and how much radiation they had been exposed to,” LaBaer said. “We developed an assay to assess gene expression in the white blood cells in a manner that would predict radiation dose.” Dr. Joshua LaBaer and ASU’s Biodesign Institute are playing an important role in the state’s testing capabilities for COVID-19.