UCSF launches novel approach to help unravel mysteries of long COVID

Hoping to speed up understanding of long COVID — and hasten a cure for millions of sufferers — UCSF researchers on Thursday announced the opening of the world’s first bank of tissue specimens from people who have the mysterious disorder.

The decision to collect such samples and make them available for researchers everywhere to study rests on growing evidence that bits of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, can remain active in human tissue for months or years after the body should have cleared it. For example, UCSF researchers recently found the virus in a patient’s colon tissue 676 days after the person was infected with the coronavirus.