COVID-19 NEWS
A Biobank for
the Lifespan
Q: Why doesn’t SARS-CoV-2 affect kids the same way it
affects adults?
It’s been a relief for parents and pediatric specialists alike that children, as
a group, don’t seem to get as sick as adults do from COVID-19. It’s also an
urgent research question: Why don’t they?
“There might be factors in
children that protect them,”
says pediatric pulmonologist
and critical care specialist
Peter Mourani, MD.
“Alternately, there could be
factors in adults that make
them more vulnerable. And
there are kids who do get
very sick, and we want to
understand why that happens,
while other kids are protected.”
COVID-19 RESEARCH,
ALL TOGETHER
Back in April, Thomas Flaig,
MD, was thinking about
those questions, too. As Vice
Chancellor for Research at
the University of Colorado
Denver and Anschutz Medical
Campus, home to Children’s
Colorado and the University of
Colorado School of Medicine,
he knew he’d be fielding a lot
of requests for COVID-19 data
and specimens.
“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
10 | CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL COLORADO