SARS Wars: A New Hope

Instructor

• Christopher James Langmead cjl@cs.cmu.edu

• Computational Biology Department, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University

Course Description

This is a free, online course covering topics relevant to SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19. It consists of a set of prerecorded mini-lectures and some simple exercises & quizzes. This course is intended for a wide audience with some spare time. No background in biology or medicine is required. If you complete this course, and have about $3, feel free to treat yourself to a cup of coffee.

About the title: The course's name is a (terrible) pun on the first Star Wars film. It is in no way intended to trivialize the catastrophe that we are all experiencing. We need as many people as possible to understand the phenomenon so that we can manage it, and one day have effective vaccines and treatments. Note: I've been told that there is a 2004 Thai film by the same name directed by Taweewat Wantha. "Great minds think alike ... and so do ours" (anonymous quote).

Title image source

Course Outline

1. Viruses

   • What are they? Where do they come from?

   • How do they get infect their hosts? What do they do upon infection?

   • Coronaviruses & SARS-CoV-2,

2. COVID-19 & the Epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2

   • Signs and Symptoms

   • Epidemiology

3. Vaccines and Antivirals

   • Antiviral Mechanisms

   • The immune system and vaccines

Course outcomes

Students who complete the course successfully will be able to:

• Understand the differences between a virus and a bacterium

• Understand how viruses infect their hosts, and how they replicate

• Understand what coronaviruses are, and where they come from

• Understand how SARS-CoV-2 leads to COVID-19

• Understand the difference between an antiviral and a vaccine

• Understand the types of vaccines, and what will be needed to develop a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 or a universal coronavirus vaccine.

Note 1: If you find this course interesting, you may also be interested in my full-semester course on Computational Medicine at Carnegie Mellon University. Most of that content is available for free.

Note 2: If you are interested in modeling biological systems, regardless of the spatiotemporal scale, I wholeheartedly recommend the course Biological Modeling: A Free Online Course by my colleague Phillip Compeau who is, without a doubt, one of the most gifted and innovative educators in Computational Biology!