Clinical Research and Health Care Services

Dr. Leonardo Tamariz is working with a team of cardiologists and researchers to understand the relationship between cardiac injury and COVID-19 severity. The team will conduct an extensive evaluation of 50 patients with a new COVID-19 infection who require hospital admission and will test myocardial injury and inflammatory biomarkers, use cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR), and offer a social determinants of health survey. Blood will be saved for future biomarker discovery and genomic evaluation.

Dr. J. Sunil Rao, professor and director of the Division of Biostatistics, is developing a new model to parse out why certain groups of people with COVID-19 seem to have systematically worse outcomes when compared to others. As these patterns change from country to country, Dr. Rao is investigating whether those drivers can be identified. At this stage, he is working with public data sources.

Dr. Camilo Riccordi, Dr. Joshua Hare, Dr. Shari Messinger Cayetano, and others are working on a project titled "Stem cell therapies for severe COVID-19 disease – a randomized clinical trial." Read more about the trial.

Dr. Susanne Doblecki-Lewis, an alumna of the MSPH program at the Department of Public Health Sciences, will be leading a large-scale study from the National Institutes of Health to develop a safe and effective vaccine to treat COVID-19. The University of Miami Miller School of Medicine plans to enroll 1,000 volunteers in South Florida to participate in the clinical trial.

Dr. Dushyantha Jayaweera and Dr. Olveen Carrasquillo, from the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and the Department of Public Health Sciences respectively, are leading the ENSEMBLE study. The clinical trial is part of an international effort in collaboration with Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Inc. to develop a safe and effective vaccine for COVID-19. The objective of the clinical trial is to determine if the investigational vaccine can prevent symptomatic COVID-19 after a single-dose treatment.