Alliance Research Initiative Provides 'Great Opportunity' for Graduate Student

Hammodah Alfar is in his second year of graduate school in the UK College of Medicine Department of Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry, with a specialized interest in platelet biology.

He has gained important research experience as a member of the Virus-Induced Thrombosis Alliance (VITAL), led by Beth Garvy, PhD, associate dean for biomedical education, and Sidney Whiteheart, PhD, professor of molecular and cellular biochemistry.

The VITAL Alliance investigates how viral diseases increase the risk of blood clotting, which is exactly what Alfar wanted to study for his PhD project. So far through the Alliance, he has helped collect samples and has gained valuable knowledge from studying them.

“Having previously worked with mice only made me naïve to the heterogeneity present in humans and how each person is biologically different from the other unlike mice,” Alfar said. “I learned patients’ requirement criteria and which protocols should be followed to do human research.”

One of the standout moments of his time in the Alliance happened when the team identified an anticoagulant protein present in lower amounts among severe COVID-19 patients. The protein predisposes them to clots. In his future career Alfar hopes to identify what causes the development of these clots in virally-infected individuals and eventually help develop drugs that can prevent their occurrence.

“As the ultimate goal of most of the outgoing research is to find a cure for human-related diseases,” he said, “the Alliance Research Initiative has been a great opportunity to see if what we have learned from the non-human experiments is applied as well on humans.”