Pitt doctor leading covid-19 battle discusses lessons learned through sports, optimistic for football's return

Not much has made me smile since the covid-19 shut-in.

Tiger King. Bert Kreischer’s new comedy special. Oh, and this dog video.

Good boy’s reaction...?pic.twitter.com/OK3t2x1VJU

— Rex Chapman? (@RexChapman) April 15, 2020

C’mon! You gotta laugh every time, right?

There was one other thing that gave me a chuckle. It was back on April 2 when UPMC and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine announced that Dr. Louis Falo and his team had developed a potential vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus causing the covid-19 pandemic.

Suddenly, Pitt’s celebratory #H2P was trending on Twitter. Was ESPN replaying the Panthers’ 2016 win over Penn State at the same time or something?

No. It was Pitt fans, many of the same Panthers sports fan accounts I frequently see on my timeline, extolling the accomplishment of Dr. Falo and his fellow scientists as if Pitt’s football team had just won a big game.

“#H2P symbolizes everything that Pitt does,” Falo told me on Friday afternoon. “That’s terrific to be mentioned in that context.”

The appreciation from the sports community — particularly in Oakland — resonates with Falo because he is very much a part of it.

Now, Falo is a professor and chair of dermatology at Pitt’s School of Medicine and UPMC. He also earned a doctorate in immunology at Harvard.

Going back a few years, Falo was a linebacker at Greensburg Central Catholic High School — a starter on the 1976 Century Conference championship squad. He also wrestled and was a sprinter on the track team. He has three children who have been heavily active in athletics at North Allegheny. Two of them now attend Pitt.

Falo says he might have had opportunities to pursue football at the college level, but he pursued a career in medicine at the University of Pittsburgh instead. Given that Pitt finished in the top 10 six times over a seven-year stretch between 1976 and 1982, Falo doesn’t regret the decision to box up his cleats in favor of a microscope.

“That wasn’t going to happen. I can tell you that. Those were some great teams back then,” Falo said, laughing at the idea of trying to play for the Panthers.

“I can thank my dad for steering me towards school, instead of sports.”

To this day, though, Falo credits life lessons learned from football as part of the reason for his team’s progress so far in developing the potential vaccine against covid-19.

“I enjoyed football the most because of the teamwork,” Falo said. “In football, you have the opportunity to be part of a group. You get that foxhole mentality. You learn teamwork. You learn discipline. You learn from the other guys around you. They are counting on you.

“I think sports, particularly in high school, is very formative for what you do later in life.”

Falo, 61, says that the relationships he formed with some of his former teammates were strong enough that they still get together for Friday night high school football games from time to time.

Despite the breadth of his studies — which took him through Harvard Medical School before returning to Pitt — Falo never lost his affinity for Pittsburgh sports, maintaining his rooting interest for the Steelers and Panthers.

Falo is especially interested in Pitt athletics. From football to wrestling to soccer.

“I love what they are doing,” Falo beamed.

The vaccine delivery system created by the doctors at Pitt consists of micro needles. It can probably fit on your fingertip. It is then applied as a patch. The needles, which are made of sugar, dissolve into the skin.

As Falo described at the press conference to announce the vaccine, the micro needle patch “delivers the vaccine antigen directly to the areas that are made to make an immune response.”

Did that go over your head? It went over mine.

In our conversation, he probably figured out that I wandered out of my depth when I essentially asked, “So, Doc, how does this band-aid thingy of yours work?”

Without prompting, the doctor immediately defaulted to a sports analogy. Perhaps for my benefit. Perhaps that’s just because it’s how he thinks.

“Your skin is like the front line of your defense,” Falo responded. “It’s like your defensive line. You’re getting hit every day by viruses and bacteria. And you don’t even know it because your skin is doing such a great job protecting you. Because of that, it has evolved a very potent immune system. If you can get something into the skin, chances are you’re going to get a good immune response for your whole body.”

Oh. OK. Actually, now I got it.

And while the very topic of the sports world returning in any capacity has been taboo for some in the medical community to discuss, Falo has a positive spin.

“I don’t think it’ll be the vaccine that saves football season. But I think some of the other things that are in place that we are hearing every day on the news give us some encouragement,” Falo said.

That sounds more optimistic than a lot of what I’ve heard. How come?

“There’s a couple of very short-term things that are happening right now that give us great hope. There are actually several therapies. Not vaccines. But treatments that are in clinical trials right now. So the timeline for those is much shorter than a timeline for a vaccine.

“That kind of data is more in real time. And I hope that we see something very positive coming from those trials that are being done right now.”

Well, amid the information wars about what data and stories we should believe and which ones we shouldn’t, I’ll choose to believe the guy who may have developed the vaccine that could end the greatest calamity of the past century.

How ‘bout you?

“Some of these treatments mess up the way the virus replicates,” Falo continued. “So now the virus isn’t replicating, and you get better. Other treatments are affecting the overall immune response. So there are a lot of mechanisms that are in play. And that’s a really good thing. Because if we test a lot of different things, that improves the chances that we’ll find one or two things that work really well.”

Usually, that #H2P hashtag indicates victory. Obviously, we are still a long way from winning this battle. And it’s not clear if Dr. Falo’s “band-aid thingy” is going to be a wonder-cure just yet.

Regardless, it shouldn’t matter if you went to Penn State, or Duquesne, or West Virginia, or, I don’t know, maybe … Syracuse. A #H2P for Dr. Falo and his team is in order from all of us.

You can listen to the entire podcast with Dr. Louis Falo here.