Many of us hadn’t heard about coronavirus before March 2020—but that wasn’t the case for Vineet David Menachery, PhD. He remembers exactly where he was when he started hearing about a novel coronavirus circulating in China. It was New Year’s Eve 2019, and he was on a family vacation to India where he had promised his family he wouldn’t work or get online.

“I started getting texts and emails from people in the field, and I couldn’t ignore them,” he said. “It was 10 o’clock at night and I was sitting on the bed using Google Translate to read reports from China before we knew for sure it was coronavirus.”

For Dr. Menachery, those people ‘in the field’ were colleagues who, like him, study virology and immunology. Dr. Menachery had already spent more than a decade studying coronaviruses. This was before he joined the Division of Pediatric Infectious Disease at Emory as a researcher and started collaborating with Children’s as part of the Center for Childhood Infections and Vaccines (CCIV) in 2024, and before he was named one of the most influential researchers in the world by Clarivate in 2025." Back in 2020, he was working at the University of Texas Medical Branch in the Galveston National Lab. Before that, he completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill where he studied with Ralph Baric, PhD, a world leader in the study of coronaviruses.

“When we first started getting reports, we didn’t know exactly what kind of threat we were facing,” he said. “But by the end of the first week in January, we knew we had a new coronavirus. It started with a sinking worry in January and February, and then in March of 2020 everything hit.”

Dr. Menachery and his colleagues weren’t particularly surprised or caught off guard at first—we had already seen two coronavirus outbreaks in this century—but the scope of this outbreak continued to grow. “There was a lot of work on coronaviruses before 2020 because coronaviruses were not rare events and we knew something like the pandemic could happen,” he said. “We are constantly in situations where animals might have viruses that could infect us. The world is not getting any smaller. Infections like this are inevitable.”

A Global Pandemic Gets Personal

As with all viruses, coronavirus is constantly changing. “Coronavirus is a really difficult disease because of complexity,” Dr. Menachery said. “It is an immune mediated disease that previously had not usually been an issue for younger people. But this time, some responses in kids were dysregulated in different ways.”

Dr. Menachery saw this dysregulation up close and personal when one of his own children was infected with COVID-19 and developed multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C). “I have three kids—and this was the sickest child I have ever seen,” he said.

Fortunately, his child recovered—but the personal experience highlighted just how important the kind of research on coronaviruses done in the Menachery Lab is for people around the world.

While all of this was happening in Dr. Menachery’s personal life, his professional life was also changing. Coronavirus had gone from a topic of concern to a few researchers to a topic of daily discussion for almost everyone around the world. Dr. Menachery and his colleagues had always understood the importance of their work. Now, everyone else did too.

What COVID-19—and Other Viruses—Can Teach Us

Viruses are, by their nature, a bit rebellious. That’s part of what led Dr. Menachery to study them in the first place. “Viruses are some of the most subversive organisms in biology,” he said. “They are disruptive—a virus needs to disrupt a host, and there is not one way any virus does things. It’s like asking how you would paint a wall—you could spray it, use a roller, use a brush or try a completely different way.”

Examining the ways a virus infects a host can help us better understand how to best fight, treat and prevent illness. “By learning how our bodies deal with infection, we learn more about how we can help our immune response to be powerful,” Dr. Menachery said. “By studying viruses and our immune responses, we have the opportunity to refine and make treatments better.”

That goes not only for coronaviruses, but for all viruses. “If we invest time and effort into studying COVID-19—a virus that has become almost as common as a cold—what we learn can be applied to other infections,” he said. “Then, if a child gets a viral infection, we will be more likely to have therapeutics. What we learn about coronavirus has implications against other viruses and infections.”

In better understanding COVID-19 infection and disease, the Menachery lab hopes to use this knowledge to build next generation therapeutics to treat all respiratory virus infections. Dr. Menachery and his group also hope to better understand infection differences between both the young and the old so that treatments can be tailored to each age group. Pursuing these areas, the Menachery lab seeks to capitalize on the promise of personalized medicine across all ages to improve infection outcomes.

Originally published here.