Dr. Carolyn Bramante went to medical school at the University of Minnesota and Johns Hopkins for residency in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics ("Med-Peds"). After residency, she stayed at Hopkins for the General Internal Medicine (GIM) Fellowship from 2016 to 2018. This was a T32-funded fellowship focused on learning the conduct of clinical research. Her research interests during fellowship were obesity, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. She was very happy to return to the University of Minnesota on Faculty in 2018. She joined the KL2 Career Development program in 2019 and submitted my K23 on adolescent obesity in March 2020.
Dr. Carolyn Bramante was motivated to become involved in COVID research because it seemed that adiposity and adipokine cascade was being under-appreciated as a risk factor for poor outcomes from COVID-19. Others at the University began researching metformin after a computer simulation model predicted that it would disrupt viral translation by mTOR inhibition, and then others used natural language processing to find medications active against mTOR. Metformin was one of those medications, and with her background in obesity medicine, she was asked to help write a paper with observational analyses conducted in a large insurance claim database. There was an association between prevalent metformin use and less severe Covid-19 in our analysis and others at that point, and because metformin is very safe, inexpensive, and widely available, it seemed important to conduct a randomized clinical trial. After raising money and regulatory approvals, she conducted the COVID-OUT trial, which assessed metformin, ivermectin, and fluvoxamine as early outpatient treatment of SARS-CoV-2 infection.
