The NIAID national protocol intends to enroll at least 1000 COVID19 patients in a study designed to track infected patients through tracking, over time, their immune responses, viral load, and a variety of multi-omic analytes that can provide deep insights into how infection by SARS-CoV-2 is revealed in host defense responses and disease- perturbed networks. At the heart of this study is the establishment of high quality biorepositories that can be used to quantitatively assess viral load, quantitatively interrogate viable PBMCs, and permit direct comparisons between different patients and different time points of disease progression. The nature of the infection, with highly differential patient outcomes, will eventually require significant computational efforts that can account for confounding factors such as co-morbidities, the influence of various therapies that are being broadly tested in these patients, etc. It will also almost certainly require all 1000 projected patients, if not more, to resolve some of the most outstanding and urgent clinical questions. However, all of these results rely on establishing high quality biobanks, resource sharing, and data sharing. This is an area in which the ISB has deep expertise and is excited to contribute. The ISB and SMC launched a joint study designed to enroll 200 COVID19 patients around 3/20/2020. That study has overlap with the NIAID protocol and shares a common set of over-arching goals. Here we propose to increase that overlap and to make that accruing biobank of COVID19 patient specimens and associated characterization data a national resource through inclusion in the NIAID protocol.
A proposal to link an Institute for Systems Biology/Swedish Medical Center ongoing investigation of COVID19 patients to the larger NIAID nationwide COVID19 patient immunophenotyping study is described. The primary aim is to build a high quality biobank of stored biospecimens from COVID19 patients, from which specimens can be shipped for analysis by NIAID-designed core facilities for the study, or analyzed using in-house or contracted assays, which are described. In association with that Aim, we also describe efforts to align our existing study more closely with the NIAID protocol.
