Congratulations to Dr. Negar Omidvari, Assistant Project Scientist in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, who has been awarded an R01 grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to investigate the immune and systemic manifestations of post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC, or “Long COVID”).

This four-year, $3.2 million collaborative project with UCSF will leverage the UCSF Long-term Impact of Infection with Novel Coronavirus (LIINC) clinical infrastructure for patient recruitment, symptom evaluation, and clinical phenotyping. Participants will then visit UC Davis’s EXPLORER Molecular Imaging Center (EMIC) for blood tests and total-body PET/CT imaging on the uEXPLORER scanner using the [18F]F-AraG radiotracer, which targets activated T cells. The study titled: "Multi Parametric Total-Body Imaging of Immune Activation in Post Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 (PASC)" will use advanced kinetic modeling to identify sites of immunological perturbation and vascular dysfunction in PASC patients, offering a total-body view of tissue-level manifestations of PASC.