Building a National Biorepository Infrastructure Could Boost Preparedness for Future Pandemics

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Making the case for a nationwide network of institutions that maintain biorepositories as preparation for the next pandemic, a group of researchers from a safety-net hospital in Boston describe the creation of their own repository in a new article.

In March of 2020, researchers from Boston Medical Center (BMC) found themselves struggling to balance caring for patients with the need to find solutions to urgent pandemic-related questions. The staff recognized the importance of creating a COVID-19 biorepository to support both critical science and to ensure that the patient population would be represented in research.

It soon became apparent that the next step would be the creation of a national network to make sure samples were collected and stored in a uniform way, the authors write in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Being able to respond to each new disease “is predicated on us gathering good information and data as well as samples as the pandemic is going on,” said BMC’s Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, who is also director of the Center for Emerging Diseases, Health Policy and Research at Boston University.

BMC was caring for a patient population that was disproportionately affected by the pandemic, Dr. Bhadalia told Reuters Health by phone. Nearly 76% of the patients came from underserved population, such as low-income or elderly adults; more than 50% self-identified as African American or Latino; and 29% did not speak English as their primary language. By April of 2020, BMC had the highest proportion of COVID-19 cases among Boston area hospitals.

“From the early days of the pandemic, our hospital’s leadership prioritized and supported a centralized research effort,” Dr. Bhadelia and colleagues write. “Instead of numerous, independent, investigator-initiated efforts to collect samples, we envisioned the biorepository as a central hub, facilitating standardization, optimizing quality of research and health care delivery, and reducing effects on patients and providers.”

Challenges faced by the team included engaging the clinical care staff, balancing research and care, reducing patient burden of sample collection, addressing language barriers, ensuring that samples met current and future research needs and finding the money to support the endeavor.

The BMC staff had banked 48,000 sample aliquots from 10,500 patients, representing both symptomatic and asymptomatic patients positive for SARS-CoV-2 and those who were negative for the virus.

“This concept is not new,” Dr. Bhadelia said, “but making it part of the pandemic response infrastructure going forward is important.”

The paper highlights an important topic, said Dr. Arturo Casadevall, chair of molecular microbiology and immunology at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland.

“Establishing biorepositories is a very important step for the continuing struggle against COVID-19 and for combatting future pandemics,” Dr. Casadevall told Reuters Health by email. “In the case of COVID-19, it is clear that the virus has been, and is, changing rapidly, and having samples from the earliest days of the pandemic to recent times is essential for knowing how it is changing and how people respond to these changes.”

“We need to continue to collect material and archive it using the highest standards to preserve all the information they contain,” said Dr. Casadevall, who wasn’t involved in the new report. “These efforts need to be replicated in other countries and deserve full support from governments.”

The new paper also underscores the importance of developing standardization and having a national network, commented Dr. Waleed Javaid, director of infection prevention and control at the Mount Sinai Downtown Network, in New York. “Otherwise we have no centralized way of spreading the data out to others.”

How the information is collected and stored is important, but just as important is having the ability to share the information efficiently, Dr. Javaid, who also was not involved in the work, told Reuters Health by phone.

SOURCE: https://bit.ly/3bBd9KY and https://bit.ly/3nOzgn5 Annals of Internal Medicine, online November 1, 2021.

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