Biobank Specimens Archives - Colorado Longitudinal Study

Researching the Link Between Blood Type and COVID-19 Risk

Several studies recently published seem to show a correlation — not causation — between blood type and risk of contracting COVID-19 or experiencing more severe symptoms. The studies are interesting, but researchers warn that much further research is needed. Mypinder Sekhon, an intensive care physician at Vancouver General Hospital and an author of one of the studies, said, “As a clinician … [blood type] is at the back of my mind when I look at patients and stratify them. But in terms of a definitive marker we need repeated findings across many jurisdictions that show the same thing.” Sekhon added that he doesn’t believe blood type “supersedes other risk factors of severity” for Covid-19, such as a person’s age or comorbidities. “If one is blood group A, you don’t need to start panicking, and if you’re blood group O, you’re not free to go to the pubs and bars.”

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Biorepository Provides Access to Big Data

Adrian Vella, MD, with Mayo Clinic, wanted to understand why some adults have high blood sugar (glucose) but never develop diabetes while others do. To understand this phenomenon, Dr. Vella had been trying for years, without success, to find patients with uncommon variants of a diabetes-associated gene called TCF7L2. Humans can carry different variants of TCF7L2 in theirDNA — one that helps protect against diabetes and one that predisposes people to the disease. To understand how these variants work, Dr. Vella needed to find a lot of people with both types of variants. Using samples from just one biobank would not yield the numbers he needed. But Mayo’s biorepository that stores samples from more than 100 biobanks allowed him to search a much larger number of DNA samples and he quickly found what he needed.

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PBMCs Might Have Solved the Mystery of COVID in Africa

African nations have experienced a much lower rate of COVID infections than most of the world. Researchers hoped that analyzing PBMCs (a type of blood cell) stored during an earlier influenza vaccine trial would have helped test a hypothesis that people in these countries had stronger immunity against COVID due to exposure to other coronaviruses. Unfortunately, temperature fluctuations in the storage of the cells had rendered them useless for this research, showing the importance of proper storage of biospecimens to preserve fragile molecules.

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Covid-19 Specimen Bank Accelerates Research

Researchers using biological specimens to determine how long it takes to produce neutralizing antibodies to the COVID-19 virus.

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