Ramratnam said research assistants in those emergency departments and at the Lifespan Clinical Research Center are contacted every time a patient reporting a flu-like illness comes to the hospital. After patients have received clinical care, research assistants have the opportunity to ask them to donate blood to the COVID-19 Biobank, following a Lifespan- and Brown-approved consent process.

“If they’re too ill or not interested, we leave,” he said. “If they express interest, we tell them exactly what it entails, what samples we will take and how we will safeguard their primary health information. The importance of implementing a crystal-clear informed consent process was something we thought was paramount.”

According to biobank supervisor Rony Lopez, clinical staff have collected blood samples from about 130 patients since the biobank was launched in May. The patients vary in age, sex, race and income level; some tested positive for COVID-19 and others tested negative. Technicians at the Clinical Research Center have used the samples to process nearly 3,000 vials of plasma, serum and peripheral blood mononuclear cells, which has already aided researchers in a wide variety of virus-related studies.

So far, Ramratnam said, between 15 to 20 research teams at Brown have used the samples to begin research that aims to help doctors diagnose COVID-positive patients more easily and effectively, predict individual patients’ capacity to recover from the virus, and prevent COVID-positive patients from suffering long-term organ and lung damage.

Dr. Wafik El-Deiry, a professor of medical science, pathology and laboratory medicine who leads the new Cancer Center at Brown University, used plasma samples from the biobank in a clinical research experiment launched alongside other Brown faculty, graduate student researchers, Lifespan employees and investigators at Boston biotech company Verastem Oncology. Typically focused on cancer and lung disease research, El-Deiry and colleagues drew on their knowledge of cell biology and the immune system to identify a class of drugs that may help treat non-life-threatening symptoms of novel coronavirus. El-Deiry noted that his ad hoc research team, Brown Experimentalists Against COVID-19, received a University COVID-19 Research Seed Fund award to support the work.

“If we lessen the ability of the viral infection to spread by blocking the infection process and by stimulating the immune system early on, we predict patients would not get as sick,” El-Deiry said. “While we hope a COVID-19 vaccine is found soon, we know because of illnesses such as the flu that vaccines don’t prevent illness in everyone. With this research, we hope to have demonstrated a way to treat those who still get infected and become ill. Without the availability of COVID-19-positive plasma samples through the biobank, we could not have arrived at these findings so quickly.”

Brown and Lifespan launched the COVID-19 Biobank so quickly — Ramratnam said it took them about a week — that their clinicians and researchers have since been inundated with questions from other centers for translational research who are interested in doing the same. Ramratnam hopes Advance-CTR can eventually partner with other centers to build a national virtual biobank.

“We did it in record time, which proves that wonderful things happen when our medical school and our hospitals team up,” he said. “Building this biobank required financial and intellectual support from both constituents and couldn’t have been possible without one or the other. It’s been a true combined effort.”