It was nearly two months ago that Biogen, the life sciences giant based in Boston, held a meeting at the Boston Marriott Long Wharf that would change the course of coronavirus' spread in Massachusetts and around the world. Roughly 175 people were at the meeting. The company initially confirmed that three employees based outside of Massachusetts tested positive for COVID-19.
Over the course of the next several weeks, that number grew exponentially and expanded far beyond the Bay State. Biogen became a "super-spreader," with employees carrying the virus to at least six states, the District of Columbia and three countries.
Many of those employees have now recovered from the illness. And as life sciences professionals, they want to aid in the fight, as the number of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. surpasses 600,000. Over the last several weeks, Biogen leaders have reached out to partners in the hospital and biomedical community, including the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, Partners HealthCare and Massachusetts General Hospital.
Now, Biogen employees who have recovered from COVID-19, along with their families and close contacts, will be the first volunteers in a project spearheaded by those institutions to pull together de-identified biological and medical data to advance knowledge and search for potential vaccines and treatments.
Partners HealthCare, Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital are coordinating the effort to collect that data to build a biobank. Data from blood samples will be generated at the Broad Institute and de-identified. The biobank will provide a data set that has the potential to shed light on the biology of the virus and illuminate pathways for potential vaccines and treatments. It will also store frozen samples, which may inform future research with appropriate patient consent.
“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,” Eric S. Lander, president and founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, said in a statement. “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 biobank should also offer insight into why some patients with COVID-19 are asymptomatic, researchers said. The blood samples collected by the Broad Institute will also be used to evaluate the levels of antibodies built against the novel coronavirus.
The data will be accessible by Biogen as well as researchers around the world.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has had a very direct, very personal impact on our Biogen community,” Dr. Maha Radhakrishnan, Biogen's chief medical officer, said in the statment. “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. Many Biogen colleagues have been eager to find ways to help others during this pandemic, and it is our hope that this biobank will provide hope and essential information during this difficult time."
