Mayo Clinic developing biorepository for long COVID research

September 29, 2021

In September, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched a research initiative to understand why some people who were infected with COVID-19 don't fully recover, or develop new or returning symptoms after recovery — what the NIH refers to as "long COVID" or post-acute sequelae.

As part of its Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) initiative, the NIH awarded $40 million to Mayo Clinic to develop a comprehensive biorepository — a central resource of biospecimen collections to facilitate personalized medicine research — as the source of clinical samples for long COVID research studies.

"Mayo Clinic is in a unique position to provide support to this very important initiative with its state-of-the-art infrastructure and expertise in biobanking for researchers to tackle the long-term effects of COVID," says Mine Cicek, Ph.D., director of the Mayo Clinic Biospecimens Accessioning and Processing Core Laboratory and the principal investigator of the award. Stephen Thibodeau, Ph.D., and Thomas Flotte, M.D., in Mayo Clinic’s Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, are co-principal investigators of this award.

The initiative is a national effort to bring together scientists, clinicians, patients, and caregivers to take on the long-term effects of COVID-19. Mayo Clinic and its biorepository core joins New York University and its clinical science core, and Massachusetts General Hospital and its data resource core, as the three initiative cores that will provide the study's infrastructure and organizational framework. Together, these cores will build and support the initiative, as well as its participant pool and a team of investigators. These cores will ensure that data are standardized and shared among researchers and the public.

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