When I called up Dr. Kirsten-like, she'd set aside precisely 30 minutes for us to talk.

She ended up giving me 38.

But still, she was in a hurry.

Were you just doing vaccinations a couple hours ago?

I was doing vaccinations about 120 seconds ago, actually.

Two minutes ago, and I just ran over from the vaccination area.

Kirsten is running one of the coronavirus vaccine trials that have cropped up around the country.

Her labs at the University of Maryland.

And this work, it's not like any

other experiment she's run before. Her vaccines are at the very earliest phase of human testing.

It's called phase one. You know, a straightforward phase one study is usually 40 people,

40, 50 people.

40 subjects or like 40 scientists? 40, 50 people. 40 subjects or like 40 scientists?

40 to 50 subjects, volunteers who agreed to participate.

And it may take anywhere from 12 to 18 months from the time we decide to do a study to ramp it up.

How does that compare to what you're doing now?

So I can tell you that we got a call from Pfizer roughly April to 10th, right in that zone, requesting that we consider

participation. And we had our first Zoom meeting that Wednesday. So it was essentially two

weeks of round clock work to get this study up and running

and to the point last week where we put out the call to volunteers asking for recruits.

So are you saying that normally a process that could take, I don't know, a year, took four weeks?

A month. Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying.

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