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