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CoV-2 affect kids the same way it
s and pediatric specialists alike that children, as
as sick as adults do from COVID-19. It’s also an
Why don’t they?
“We had all these research
groups planning to do
individual biobanks,” he says.
“We said, let’s do a campuslevel
protocol, put them all
together and support research
that covers the entire lifespan.”
The resulting campus-wide
biobank collects COVID-19+
tissues from consenting
pediatric and adult patients,
harvesting specimens from
testing and blood from labs
into a shared repository that
syncs tissue samples up with
electronic health record
data. That would be crucial
— to align the samples with
the clinical data to better
understand correlations
between anomalies and
outcomes.
But it’s difficult, too, because
different institutions keep
electronic health records
differently. Combining the
data in a meaningful, reliable
way requires special expertise.
Luckily, the Anschutz
Medical Campus had that
infrastructure in place in the
form of Health Data Compass,
an existing campus resource
set up to leverage electronic
health record data for crossinstitutional
collaborations
exactly like this one.
And in this case, it would
support dozens of different
research projects.
BIOBANKING
THE DATA
“So for example, my group
is interested in extracting
RNA from respiratory
specimens to understand how
characteristics of the SARS-
CoV-2 virus, the respiratory
tract microbiome, and host
gene expression interact
to impact disease severity