Blogs

Jeremy Harper, MBI - independent consultant

Twenty million people in the USA and 75 million people worldwide have tested positive for COVID-19. Public health estimates that six times more people have had the disease and are not aware. A vaccine will slow the rate of growth, but no one is expecting it to eradicate the virus as it mutates and adapts.

Crowd-sourced Challenge initiatives in biomedical research provide a mechanism for transparent and rigorous performance assessment. The core idea of these studies is simple. A group of researchers, typically called the “organizers”, identify a key problem that has a diversity of potential solutions. These solutions are typically computational, meaning that each is a different algorithm or method. The organizers then identify or create a suitable benchmarking dataset and a metric of accuracy.

Francis Collins

New findings from a study of thousands of healthcare workers in England show that those who got COVID-19 and produced antibodies against the virus are highly unlikely to become infected again, at least over the several months that the study was conducted. In the rare instances in which someone with acquired immunity for SARS-CoV-2 subsequently tested positive for the virus within a six month period, they never showed any signs of being ill.

 

Guest post by Jerry Sheehan, Deputy Director, National Library of Medicine.

Making research data broadly findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable is essential to advancing science and accelerating its translation into knowledge and innovation. The global response to COVID-19 highlights the importance and benefits of sharing research data more openly.

National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS)

NCATS’ I Am Translational Science video series shares the stories of people working in translational science. Translational science emphasizes collaboration, innovation, systems approaches and knowledge integration across disciplines to understand and address the many scientific and operational bottlenecks that exist along the road from laboratory discovery to public health intervention.

Franny White

OHSU researchers studying COVID-19 are encouraged to access data from the records of more than 50,000 coronavirus-positive patients that are part of the new National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C) data platform.