School of Medicine Partners with Clinical Laboratories and the Department of Pathology to Develop a COVID19 Specimen Shared Resource
On Monday April 20, our DUHS Clinical Laboratories will begin retaining and releasing biospecimens on every patient treated at Duke for COVID19 to populate a newly-developed School of Medicine COVID19 Shared Resource under the direction of Dr. Susanna Naggie, Associate Dean for Clinical Research Initiatives. The specimens being retained are specimens that were collected as part of the routine care of our patients and would otherwise be discarded. Samples are not limited to diagnostic nasopharyngeal specimens but also include blood, urine, and stool. In partnership with Tom Denny and his team in the Human Vaccine Institute, our laboratories are also providing several thousand specimens on large swaths of patients treated during specific time windows at Duke to monitor for the prevalence of COVID19 antibodies in the general population. The process of finding, retaining, and releasing COVID19 specimens among the many thousands of specimens that move through our laboratories every day is not easy. However, the work being done now will enable critical research for years to come. The ‘honest broker’ model that has been created to support this and other research through residual CP specimens is being co-led by Dr. Michael Datto, Medical Director and Associate Vice President for DUHS Clinical Laboratories, and Dr. Shannon McCall, the Director of the Biospecimen Repository and Precision Pathology Core, and Vice Chair for Clinical Research for the Department of Pathology.