Experts: Research has sputtered in CT and beyond

Non-COVID projects have been pushed back amid pandemic

A year ago, Roslyn Holly Fitch had been working on long-term research.

Her work studying developmental issues like autism and dyslexia requires the breeding and training of mice. It takes time to teach rodents to distinguish between shapes.

Then the pandemic struck.

A year later and she’s still not back where she was pre-pandemic.

“There’s no question that knowledge was lost,” she said. “I mean, research is this very long process where things sort of percolate from the bottom up to the top, and you go in and skim something off the top.”

Fitch explained that not only were researchers locked out of labs at the start of the pandemic and enticed to drop other research and apply instead for COVIDrelated projects, but the entire academic funding infrastructure, including administration and funding

panels, were redirected.

And experts say that even if non-COVID projects did get funding, they have remained low on the totem pole and not given priority.

“I don’t think we will know right away exactly how much impact each of these had,” Fitch said. “The way the research pipeline works, the effects on basic research over this year may not be felt for years to come.”

Fitch, a professor in behavioral neuroscience at the University of Connecticut, is not the only one. Across the academic spectrum, research was derailed due to coronavirus-related lockdowns and shifts in funding priorities.

“I don’t think we’re going to fully see the repercussions of this for probably 10 years, because some of the basic work that was being done in (2020), that would have been the foundation for things coming out two, three years down the line was basically taken offline,” she said.

Peter Smith, professor of comparative medicine at the Yale School of Medicine and associate director of the Yale Animal Resources Center, said the problem wasn’t that research animals weren’t being cared for during lockdowns.

Gov. Ned Lamont’s executive order at the start of the pandemic allowed “only research that was either directly related to COVID or essential for patient care and well being.”

That meant research either had to shift or just stall.

“There was no one there to do the research,” Smith said. “I’m not aware of any research that can be put on hold without any impact.”

Fitch was one of the unlucky researchers who could not shift her research to be more coronavirus-focused. She had to submit an application and plead her case to a group of university administrators.

All told, she lost six weeks in the lab but with longitudinal research, where you’re watching human or animal subjects over long periods of time, six weeks is a lot to lose.

“I would say that we’re, at this point, really not even back to where we were last March,” she said.

One problem has been funding. The National Institutes of Health have received billions of dollars in coronavirus funding and prioritized grants to researchers working in related areas.

“Everybody I know is submitting a COVID grant,” epidemiologist Steffanie Strathdee of the University of California, San Diego told the journal Science.

Tao Lu, for example, had been studying a specific type of logistics at UConn. Now he works on the logistics of vaccinations.

“Before the pandemic, I was working on actually shipping perishables,” he said. “Shipping perishable products is pretty much similar to vaccine.”

Exactly how much money has been diverted to COVID-specific research projects is not yet known. Billions has been made available, but much of that may be in addition to existing funding priorities.

“Nonetheless, the COVID funding surely had an imGinsburg, pact on other work,” Fitch said.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. The pandemic has cost the lives of 2.3 million people worldwide and untold damage to the global economy.

“So, people who are doing things, for example, like Parkinson’s, or Alzheimer’s research, or even cancer research, a lot of those resources may have been redirected to have this really rapid pace of development, which I’m not criticizing, I think that was important,” Fitch said. “It’s turned out to be really productive. And I think it’ll be life saving.”

Golda Ginsburg said she does “treatment research, developing and evaluating treatments for children, adolescents, who struggle with anxiety and depression.”

Her work naturally evolved with the pandemic, once she and her colleagues were able to shift to using video call protocols.

“All of that we did in person, now we’re doing it over Zoom, virtually,” she said.

a professor of psychiatry at the UConn School of Medicine, said her work also involves teachers and nurses in schools, and with the chaos of transitioning to hybrid models, much of that has been lost.

“There’s a lot lost,” Ginsburg said. “The school staff, they don’t have any more bandwidth to do anything except get through each day with navigating in-person, remote, different cohorts. In that sense we lost, from a research perspective, we lost quite a bit.”

But Ginsburg pointed out that it’s not just research. Nobody knows what would have happened, had the pandemic never struck.

“I think people could say that about our lives, like, if this pandemic hadn’t happened, what would I be doing? What would I have accomplished?” she said. “So much lost, in addition to research. We’re just stuck with trying to learn the consequences of this, but also how some can thrive and where we’re gonna go from here.”