Biogen Partners with MA Health Orgs to Launch COVID-19 Biobank

April 23, 2020 - Biogen, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and Partners HealthCare recently launched a consortium that will build and share a COVID-19 biobank, according to a press release.

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The biobank will help scientists study a large collection of de-identified biological and medical data to boost knowledge and search for potential COVID-19 treatments. 

Researchers will look at blood samples from recovered patients to find levels of neutralizing antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 and other immunity aspects, which may help to advance short-and long-term COVID-19 treatments. 

Data from blood samples will be generated at the Broad Institute and the biobank will then provide an anonymous medical and biological data set that may uncover the biology of coronavirus and discover pathways for potential drugs and vaccines. 

Biogen and researchers around the world will not have access to the frozen samples that will be stored and used for future research. This means identifiable information will be kept private and the company will not know which employees and close contacts volunteered to participate. 

“Patients who have volunteered to donate data to accelerate the shared understanding of the disease play a crucial role in the global effort to overcome COVID-19. Through a shared biobank, researchers will be able to identify new patterns and drastically expand our knowledge of a disease,” said Eric S. Lander, president and founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. 

“We are enormously grateful to the Biogen employees, their family members, and other close contacts who have volunteered to take part in this essential effort.”

The collaboration began when Biogen employees, who became the first individuals in Massachusetts to be diagnosed and recover from COVID-19, wanted to contribute their own medical information to research efforts underway at Biogen and other organizations.  

Individuals who have recovered from COVID-19 and those in close contact with infected individuals are eligible to participate. Partners Healthcare, Massachusetts General Hospitals, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital are coordinating the effort. 

“The COVID-19 pandemic has had a very direct, very personal impact on our Biogen community. We are uniquely positioned to contribute to advancing COVID-19 science in an organized and deliberate way so we can all gain a better understanding of this virus,” Maha Radhakrishnan, MD, chief medical officer at Biogen, said in the press release. 

“We are uniquely positioned to contribute to advancing COVID-19 science in an organized and deliberate way so we can all gain a better understanding of this virus. It is our hope that this biobank will provide hope and essential information during this difficult time. It is an opportunity to activate and bring together our commitment to science with the needs of humanity, and we are proud to participate.”

Deborah Hung, MD, PhD, a core faculty member at the Broad Institute and co-director of the Infectious Disease and Microbiome Program at Harvard, said that the ability to partner with leading healthcare and biomedical institutions in the Boston area allows organizations to launch many critical research approaches at once. 

“We’re grateful to these individuals for their willingness to participate, and hope that by sharing their data, researchers everywhere will be able to make new discoveries that point the way toward effective treatments,” Hung said. 

Experts emphasized that the biobank will provide essential information during the pandemic because it presents an opportunity to activate and bring together various organizations’ commitment to tackle the needs of humanity. 

Individuals with common exposure will provide a lens into why some people show signs of the disease and why others are asymptomatic. It will also uncover why some people experience more severe symptoms than others. 

“Our investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have been working around-the-clock on several promising clinical trials that we hope will lead to effective treatments for COVID-19. Patient participation in research is critical and the establishment of this biobank is a significant advancement for the research community and the broader patient population,” said Ravi Thadhani, MD, MPH, chief academic officer at Partners HealthCare. 

“We will be able to learn significantly more about the characteristics and development of this disease and make important discoveries that will lead to treatments for the patients we care for and those around the world.”