Fighting COVID-19 and other Pandemics: The Case for Biobanks

The COVID-19 pandemic has stressed the health and economies of nations around the globe to their limits and beyond. The suffering and loss has been incalculable.

Our country and many countries around the world have used a three-pronged approach to try to stop the spread of the deadly virus: broad-based, severe social distancing; extensive testing to detect infected individuals — even those who are not symptomatic; and attempts to develop a vaccine against the virus. Even with these efforts, this virus is not going away any time soon.

What COVID has forced us to realize is that viruses and pandemics are here to stay. We must develop new approaches to be more prepared for the next ones. One key approach to manage and minimize future pandemics before they infect hundreds of millions and kill millions of people, is to build biobanks. 

What are biobanks? They are repositories of biological specimens (blood, urine, DNA, etc) and health information (previous illnesses, amount of exercise, where you live, what your job is, your social networks). Biobanks will allow researchers to discover what pre-existing health conditions or environmental factors make some people more vulnerable to certain diseases; and what diagnostics and therapies can be developed to treat the most vulnerable. Then we can concentrate our precious resources where they will have the greatest impact on the health of the greatest number of people.

Biobanks are not something most people are familiar with, but they have already proved to be worthwhile in finding links between behavior and health, as well as between diseases.

For example:

• The Framingham Heart Study is now considered one of the longest, most importantepidemiological studies in medical history. In the 1960s, the study demonstrated the role cigarette smoking plays in the development of heart disease. Those findings helped fuel the first anti-smoking campaigns of that era (https://www.nfb.org/sites/www.nfb.org/files/images/nfb/publications/vodold/vspr9804.htm), as well as the seminal research defining CVD (cardiovascular disease) risk factors. The Framingham Study fundamentally shaped public health guidelines for CVD prevention. 
• Genetic analysis of some of the participants in the UK Biobank (https://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk), which comprises 500,000 people in Great Britain, revealed links between insulin resistance and coronary artery disease (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28714974/). 
• George Washington University is setting up a COVID-19 specimen bank to accelerate research. They will collect samples from COVID-positive patients from day 1-11 and then at 10 weeks, 6 months, and one year later (https://smhs.gwu.edu/news/gw-sets-covid-19-specimen-bank-accelerate-research). 

Biobanks hold data that can be used to find patterns regarding who will most likely become infected, who among those infected is likely to become mildly ill, or require hospitalization, or need intensive care during a pandemic, as well as who is likely to remain healthy. 

While “biobank” can refer to biological specimens taken from a single patient and under the control of a single individual, the type of biobank that will be truly transformational in the pandemic is one that is intentionally set up to collect biological samples and corresponding personal, community, and public health data on a large cross section of a given population — even before they exhibit any signs of disease.  

This is precisely the goal of the Colorado Longitudinal Study (COLS), which will be the largest and most comprehensive non-profit biobank in the world. COLS will collect and store specimens using consistent methods and all data will be integrated in a highly secure manner to preserve participant privacy.

The key element is that the biobank resources are available for qualified researchers to use to query critical questions, such as how to attack a pandemic before it actually becomes a pandemic; or why some people become diabetic when others do not. With a database this detailed, biobanks are also set up for future research, to answer questions that we haven’t yet thought to ask.Researchers from around the globe will have access to COLS data to understand who develops disease, factors that predict or lead to disease and ill health, and better ways to prevent, treat, or cure disease.

We can’t change the enormous damage that COVID-19 has already caused and will continue to cause, but with the help of biobanks we stand to gain a better understanding of pandemics and the ability to fight them more effectively in the future.

We at the Colorado Longitudinal Study (COLS) believe that biobanks hold the key to managing and understanding future pandemics, uncovering the causes of other diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease and so many others. The goal of COLS is to provide researchers with the resource to tease apart the complex relationships that determine health, leading to unprecedented advances in health, health care, and health equity.