In the U.S., the primary focus in the COVID-19 pandemic has been to get as many people vaccinated as quickly as possible.
But work is also ongoing to discover preventative therapies and medications that will help to reduce the severity of this disease - and future pandemics.
Dr. Sara Cherry is the Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She leads a team of researchers looking into drugs that could be used to treat COVID-19.
Among the observations they have made is how and where the virus infects people.
"We’ve been characterizing how the virus is able to gain entry and replicate within different parts of your respiratory tract," Dr. Cherry said. "As you go deeper into the lungs, the cells are a bit different... The epithelial cells, the cells lining the respiratory tract that are exposed to the air - it’s a sub class of those cells that get infected."
Understanding how the virus invades and replicates is key to developing treatments.
"That way we can also tailor therapeutics that would both mitigate the replication but also make it so that the cells are not alerting the immune system to be hyperactive."
Some people experience an overactive immune response to the virus, which can make them severely ill. But the initial immune response is a necessary part of overcoming the virus and developing antibodies which provide protection in the future.
Dr. Cherry told KCBS Radio's "Ask An Expert" her team and scientists around the world are working on medications that people could take after an exposure in order to minimize the impact of the infection.
"The ultimate goal is to be able to treat in an outpatient setting with an oral pill and either protect people or to reduce symptoms. So right now we don’t really have those drugs available…there are some drugs in clinical trials."
Dr. Cherry's team is investigating the effectiveness of various drug therapies on multiple types of coronaviruses, not just SARS-CoV-2, in order to better prepare for future pandemics.
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