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HIV vaccination was the topic of choice for Tom Caniel's PhD project at the Academic Medical Center of Amsterdam back in 2018. Little did he know, there was more in store for Tom during the four years of his PhD. Late March of this year, after everyone was mandated to work at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Tom was requested back to the lab to contribute to coronavirus research himself. Here began a wonderful but challenging part of Tom’s career.  

Normally 30 people worked in his lab, but during COVID research it was just a team of four with a postdoc, a technician and two PhD students, one of which was Tom. The team received blood samples from the second and third COVID patients in the Netherlands and set out to find antibodies that could neutralize the virus.

“We worked crazy hours ranging from 10 to 14 and sometimes even 16 hours per day.” The atmosphere during the work was unique, Tom told me. “Normally everyone has their own work and works on ‘their own island’; but now, everyone was working together towards a common goal.” Tom and his team were all in the same boat, everyone came in early and left late, ate together and hung out together. “It was a really good feeling to be part of a small team that contributes to such an important end result”.

We worked sometimes even 16 hours per day.

The whole process from the point of receiving the patients’ blood up until the submission of the paper took only 37 days. With the project going at such a pace, experiments, meetings and writing was often intermingled, “we started drafting a piece of the article with results obtained on the same day”. On day 37 they received the final data from a collaborator and directly after, Tom made the last figure, the other PhD student wrote the accompanying text, and they submitted the paper that very night. 

A month later the review process was done, and their results were ! The team accomplished what they set out to and found two of the most potent antibodies to date against COVID-19. These antibodies can neutralize the COVID-19 virus particles before they enter the cells of the patients. This helps the patient’s immune system with controlling the virus when it’s not able to do so and consequently may prevent patients from going to the ICU. Thanks to Tom and his team we are one step closer to surviving this pandemic.