Pavlo Gilchuk, Sr. Staff Scientist at the Crowe Laboratory at Vanderbilt; Robert Carnahan, the associate director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center and Rachel Nargi, laboratory manager for the Crowe Laboratory. Photos: Whitten Sabbatini

Inside a Lab Developing a Coronavirus Treatment

We may not have been prepared for a pandemic, but these scientists were

Robert Carnahan woke up at 5 a.m. to no fewer than 20 voicemails. Each message was more frantic than the last, but they all repeated the same thing: Carnahan, associate director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center, had to hop on the phone — right now! — and track down the donor who had given their blood last night for the center’s coronavirus antibody research. The scientists needed another sample before the donor boarded a plane that morning back to the West Coast.

With only about three hours until the donor had to be at Nashville’s airport, Carnahan got in touch and arranged to have them transported back to Vanderbilt’s lab. He also brought in an outside physician to take the donor’s blood; Vanderbilt’s phlebotomist, in a comedy of errors, was on vacation that particular Sunday morning, unable to help out in this particular pinch.

This ticking clock had real consequences: If Carnahan had been unable to get the donor back to the lab to give another blood sample, the scientists might have missed collecting the most potent B cells, the human cells that produce antibodies, from the donor, who had survived Covid-19 — the same antibodies that Vanderbilt is using to help develop therapies for the novel…