Interview Highlights: Processing 35,000 COVID-19 Patient Samples In 3 Months With Álvaro Cuesta-Domínguez

Cover illustration by: Arooba Ahmed (CC '23)

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Interview by: Hannah Lin (CC '23)

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Álvaro Cuesta-Domínguez, PhD, is an associate research scientist at Columbia University and the founder of  Columbia Researchers Against COVID-19 (CRAC). 

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The following is a heavily condensed version of the full interview. If you're interested, read more here.


You’re the founder of CRAC (Columbia Researchers Against COVID-19). Could you talk about how you came up with the idea?
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This is going to get personal. As a member of the LGBTQI+ community who was born in 1981, I have lived all my life with the HIV/AIDS pandemic in mind. When I heard that there was another pandemic hitting a vulnerable population, I felt like I needed to step up and do something. 

So when we got the notification from the university saying that we had to ramp down research, I thought that most researchers like me would have “free time” to help with coronavirus testing, as this relies on PCR, a routine molecular biology technique.

This was my idea when we started CRAC: organizing a group of researchers that would be willing to help in testing for the virus. About one week after we launched the group and started recruiting volunteers, we started 

getting calls from different departments and levels of administration at Columbia asking for help in different capacities. I learned that the pathology department was starting a biobank of COVID-19 patients on campus and because of my lab experience, I thought that I could help and so I was deemed the leader of the biobank project.

Could you explain what biobanking means?

​Biobanking is processing and cryopreserving (storing collected samples in freezers at -80 degrees) so that researchers can access these samples and perform research to gain insight into unknown aspects of the virus and the diseases that it causes. For example, let’s say we have one tube with 10 milliliters of blood of a COVID-positive patient. What we did was pipette different components of this blood (serum, plasma, mononuclear cells) into different tubes (in lab jargon,  “aliquot”) and then store them at -80 degrees.

​You started on March 31st, when New York was in the peak of the pandemic. What did you have to do to get this off the ground? 

The first thing was finding a space. After the space was chosen, the next thing we needed to consolidate was the workflow. A lot of challenges arose after I started recruiting people, the first one being biosafety. Not only were we asking people to leave their homes and families, we were also asking them to be in front of samples that had the potential to transmit the virus. What we did was divide the weekly schedule in four hour shifts so that every volunteer would only do four hours a 

week. We were able to do this because CRAC had, at that point, almost 500 volunteers, so it was easy to find a big group of people with the proper training and expertise. Not only was the aim to reduce possible transmission, but also to reduce burnout from a task that is very, very tedious. ​

We’ve been providing all the necessary PPE, and we take great pride in the fact that, as of today, no one has developed symptoms or gotten sick. In the beginning, I was really scared. I’ve had a lot of sleep problems thinking that someone could get sick because of their work in the biobank, and I am really glad that no one did. 

The project ended June 5th, and your team collected 35,000 samples, which is just amazing. Was it always going to be a 2 month project?

From the CRAC perspective, we were an emergency response team. We had to assemble this infrastructure in a record amount of time because we either did this or we lost these samples. And these samples are gold. Apart from the 35,000 samples, which is amazing, we donated 423.5 hours of work. This speaks a lot about the people that I’ve been working with: they’re not only great scientists, but getting to know them personally has been really touching. 


You were a co-author of an op-ed earlier this year calling for Columbia to increase pay for postdoctoral and associate research scientists. Can you talk a bit about that?

Yes, I’ve been helping to organize the postdoc and associate research scientist union at Columbia. I think we can all agree that postdocs are the backbone of research at Columbia. We bring a lot of value, prestige, and money through funding in grants. If you look at the salary ranges of our peers in the New York City area, we are, without any doubt, the researchers with lower salaries. We’re only asking to have fair salaries and fair compensation that allow us to live in one of the cities with higher cost of living. It’s as simple as that.

This really impacts the quality of our research because many of us, at some point, have had to worry about paying rent, childcare or medical bills, and this really takes our focus out of our research. So fair compensation and increased benefits for postdocs at Columbia would have a very positive impact for postdocs so that we can focus on what really matters: our experiments and projects.

Note: Since the date of this interview, the union has reached a tentative agreement. Read more here: https://columbiapostdocunion.org/contract-negotiations/cpw-uaw-status-negotiations-2020/.


To end with some optimism: what gives you hope for the future? 
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I am very optimistic. Maybe I’m too optimistic to be a scientist! [laughs] I’ve seen really good things during the response to the pandemic. I think that science is definitely changing. We have seen way more collaboration and cooperation instead of competition. My hope is that this will not just be for the pandemic and that we will be able to learn from this experience to really push science forward in a more collaborative way. 

As for the outpouring of solidarity from all the researchers that we recruited, we had more than 700 people that were willing to do anything, from labeling tubes to folding scrubs—we’re talking about people who have been doing science 

for more than 10 years and have a lot of experience. I think that really speaks a lot about our researcher community and the commitment that we have to science and society at large.