UPS donates $100,000 to U of L in support of COVID-19 research

By Eli Hughes–

UPS has pledged a $100,000 donation to the University of Louisville to fund research into a potential COVID-19 treatment.

The UPS donation will help fund the trials and pay for the test materials needed for COVID-19 research.

The funding will go to support research like Paula Bates’, which has shown promise in inhibiting COVID-19. Wanting to apply her prior research to the current COVID-19 outbreak, Bates partnered with Kenneth Palmer, the director of U of L’s Center for Predictive Medicine for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases.

Bates’ treatment involves an aptamer, a piece of synthetic DNA, that she discovered along with John Trent and Don Miller. U of L is hoping that they will be able to fast track approval of the treatment because it has already been used in human clinical trials on cancer patients and has been shown to be safe.

“I deeply appreciate the gift from UPS that helps support my work,” Bates, a professor of medicine, said. “It is with gifts such as this that we will be able to advance our research and our ability to treat the novel coronavirus. I’m also thankful to be in such a collaborative setting with great facilities and a supportive environment for translational research. There are only a few places where we could have tested this idea so quickly.”

File Graphic//The Louisville Cardinal