Mark Slifka, Ph.D., and Louis Picker, M.D., comment on early results from the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine trial. Slifka says: “It’s early, but we can be cautiously optimistic. By hitting greater than 90 percent, that’s where we want to see successful vaccines.” Picker notes the early results are promising and that more work is needed.

Former Jeopardy! Teen Tournament champion Avi Gupta discusses longtime host Alex Trebek’s legacy, and his inspiration to donate to cancer research at the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute.

Esther Choo, M.D., provides comment for an article on the impact of a Biden presidency for science. “Every election cycle, we say health care is on the ballot. This year, a health issue was the most dominant topic for the entire world and the United States. It has never so much been on the ballot. I think that still did not make this election cycle obvious,” she says.

In the film Power & Health, Ryan Petteway, M.P.H., Dr.P.H., says holding public meetings during hours when people are out of work can foster more inclusive decision making and healthier neighborhoods.

Avital O’Glasser, M.D., says “I really thought that our experiences in the trenches would impact people’s voting decisions.”

Carlos Crespo, Dr.P.H., discusses Gov. Brown’s new guidelines to slow the spread of COVID-19. He says: “If the cases are happening, that could be the next step. I hope these two weeks of pause allows everyone to re-center and go back to where we were before, when this pandemic first began.”

Experts from OHSU will collaborate with the newly formed Data Management and Portal to accelerate discoveries and advance medical care for individuals with Down syndrome.

OHSU researchers will co-lead two of the three funded pilot projects announced by the Cascade Data Alliance. Morgan Hakki, M.D., says: “We hope that this work generates novel data that will help us predict who will have a beneficial response to checkpoint inhibitor therapy, and who will have serious side effects from those therapies. We also hope that, by exploring the mechanistic basis for these outcomes, we can develop ways to intervene to positively affect these outcomes.”

Paula Amato, M.D., speaks about medically assisted reproduction in transgender communities.

David Zonies, M.D., discusses hospital surge preparations and says health care systems are working together to come up with plans to reallocate patients to other hospitals, if necessary.