Dolly Parton Is Backing Research Into Promising COVID Treatment
A million-dollar donation from America’s country music sweetheart is funding cutting-edge research into antibody treatments that could help severely ill COVID-19 patients.
Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast / Photos Getty
A treatment for COVID-19 might have gotten its start with a car crash involving Dolly Parton.
After the country music legend and American icon suffered a terrible accident in 2013, she befriended Vanderbilt University surgeon Naji Abumrad, who introduced her to the school’s cutting-edge antibody research when the COVID-19 pandemic began.
Now, Dolly has donated a million dollars to the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center—money which is hard at work paying for research into synthetic antibodies that could treat sick COVID-19 patients. And she’s not the only one. The Vanderbilt group is also backed by DARPA, the Pentagon’s premier research agency. So what is Vanderbilt doing to find a coronavirus treatment, and when will we know if it’s effective?