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Most of the world, including my own family, generally believes that viruses are agents of destruction and disease. But me and my research group, we view viruses as a sandbox of tools to build the next generation of therapeutic techniques.

Growing up, my father had a large-animal veterinary practice. It definitely instilled an interest and a love of science that you really only grow to appreciate when you take a deep dive into virus research, and then I was hooked forever. Once you understand how a virus works, you can also deconstruct it and rebuild it to perform anything you might want to achieve, from editing your own genome to delivering a protein of interest that maybe your body isn't able to make. And so it opens up countless doors to develop novel therapeutics toward diseases that presently are untreatable.

To say it was a unique experience to be a virologist in New York City during a pandemic would be a dramatic understatement. I would be on calls with the White House on a bi-weekly basis, informing them of agents that worked or didn't work or showed promise, while also understanding what were the best ways to implement policies that would mitigate further disease and transmission.

At NYU Langone, my research group had a real breakthrough in the discovery of the underlying causes of long COVID, which oddly enough required learning whether or not hamsters like Cocoa Krispies better than Cocoa Pebbles. Turns out that hamsters like Cocoa Krispies better than Cocoa Pebbles, which I think is a fair choice.

One of the things that was very unique to COVID was how it impacted the olfactory system, or your ability to smell. So we use golden hamsters to do this kind of biology and research. One of the first things we needed to determine was whether or not hamsters, like humans, lost their sense of smell early on during an acute infection. We would simply test which of three cereals hamsters happen to like best. The animals that were infected with SARS-CoV-2 never find the food at all.

Once my research group had determined that, in fact, hamsters do lose their sense of smell very much like we do, that then allowed us to take a deeper dive into why you lose your sense of smell. The neurons that are responsible for smelling, because it takes so much of their energy and metabolism to be able to smell, the moment they're asked to fortify their defenses, they do so at the expense of all the biology involved in smell. And that's why you lose your smell very quickly. Smell is sacrificed in place of defense.

One of the things that my team discovered was that, very much like in people, the impact that a virus infection has, the evidence of it, lasts far longer than the virus actually exists in the body. What we see is permanent changes to the brain and to neurobiology that really do explain a lot of the attributes, like brain fog, that patients with long COVID report. The inflammation caused by the infection can have long-term impacts.

The environment that NYU Langone Health provides really enables us to take risks and perform science that has big risks, but also has the potential for big gains.

Full transcript

My name is Benjamin tenOever. I'm a 2008 Pew biomedical scholar. I'm an associate professor at Mount Sinai School of Medicine here in New York, a virologist. A virologist focuses specifically on the study of viruses. There are many different types of viruses, just like there are many different types of animals and plants, and every virus has its own unique attribute. In some cases it's very basic knowledge, so we're just trying to understand how a virus works, how the cogs run in the cell in order to allow the infection to proceed.

At my lab, in my research, we do a lot of work with influenza. But I started incorporating a new aspect into my research, and that was these very small RNAs called microRNAs. We're trying to develop a technology that exploits the expression of these little RNAs in cells to generate a new way to make vaccines, in hopes that one day any virus that threatens humankind can be addressed and a safe vaccine can be developed.

I can't say enough about the Pew Scholar award. It was the first award I received, so if nothing else it gave me this initial sense of confidence. But what I soon learned, as I went to my first meeting, was that it was so much more than just an award. What really makes the biomedical program special is the fact that it develops this family, and you get this sense that you belong to a very exclusive club that is very friendly and very amiable to each other. So you can compare notes as to how to obtain funding, how to establish a lab, how to mentor properly.

But it also exposes you to diverse fields of research, which builds collaborations where I can take advantage of expertise that I myself don't have. My own research, which is very virus and vaccine related, has been greatly influenced by many of the Pew Scholars who study microRNA and development, which really are two diverse worlds that we've now brought together, largely because I've met these people at these Pew meetings.

In addition to the Pew meetings and being part of the Pew family, the Pew money that comes with the award is also very advantageous to have, because it's free of any restrictions. It allows us the freedom to take high-risk projects in hopes that we advance the science in leaps and bounds. So while taking big risks might fail, those are often the same projects that make significant leaps forward.