Clinical and Translational Science Award

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PROJECT SUMMARY: COMBATCOVID The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has affected every corner of the globe and has redefined healthcare throughout the United States. COVID-19 cases in the New York City tri-state area have reached an extraordinarily high number and have quickly become the epicenter region of the crisis in the United States. In New York State alone, there are over 372,000 confirmed cases as of June 1, 2020. NYU Langone Health (NYULH) has been particularly hard hit, with more than 8,100 COVID-19 hospitalizations to date. In response, the entire clinical research community is marshalling resources in an attempt to improve our understanding of how the virus spreads, how it infects various tissues in the body, which patients are more susceptible to infection and fatal outcomes, which therapeutics improve symptoms and survival, whether the immune response confers long-lasting protection against reinfection, and many other crucially important questions. The complexity of the development of this disease and unpredictability of progression into severity, as well as the variety of phenotypic outcomes observed during and post COVID-19, pose major challenges in understanding, predicting, preventing, managing and treating this disease and its sequelae. Answers to these challenges can only be achieved through the comprehensive analysis of a significantly high number of COVID cases. Given how recent and unknown this disease is, and its inherent epidemic nature, there is a limited number of cases at individual medical institutions. The limitation of number of cases per institution becomes even more relevant when isolating subpopulations with specific health conditions and across the lifespan. This proposed study will aim to overcome the above-mentioned challenges by supporting the formation of a consortium comprising multiple medical institutions in the U.S.: COMBATCOVID (Consortium for Multisite Biomedical Analytics and Trials on COVID-19). COMBATCOVID will bring together electronic health records (EHR) data from multiple participating institutions into a shared centralized database. As part of the COMBATCOVID effort, biorepository data of COVID-19 patients collected by some of the participating institutions will also be shared and linked to the respective EHR data. The COMBATCOVID consortium will be responsible for transferring EHR data pertaining to participating institutions interested in contributing EHR data to the N3C database.