Damaged Lungs Breathe Life into University of Kentucky COVID Research

on the bottom of a sealed plastic container. It doesn’t look like much ­­– in fact, it doesn’t look like anything. But this little black lump has untold potential, full of secrets for the researchers at Kentucky Research Alliance for Lung Disease (K-RALD) to discover about the pandemic that has ravaged the world for more than two years.

This black lump is a sample of a lung from a COVID-19 patient. Specifically, it belonged to Dave Hoover, the first Kentuckian to receive a double lung transplant after contracting COVID-19. Hoover fell ill in February 2021, and after declining rapidly, he was transplanted two months later. He donated his lungs to researchers in the University of Kentucky College of Medicine, who added it to the K-RALD biobank of lung samples. Read more.