May 2020 - QuartzBio

May 20, 2020 — With new information around SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 surfacing on an almost daily basis, we are consistently reminded of the complexity and relatively unknown mechanisms behind why this disease presents with such a varying degree of severity. The impacts of COVID-19 infection on pediatric patients have been of particular concern in recent weeks given the apparent links of a severe Kawasaki-like disease, Pediatric Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome (PMIS), coinciding with the pandemic. Incidence has been reported in the US and worldwide, with ~100 reports and three deaths in New York and the description of a broader outbreak in Italy outlined here.

May 18, 2020 — As the research community is generating data from novel research and looking to leverage prior research (e.g., MERS, SARS), there is significant opportunity to integrate these diverse data sources to create an even more valuable data asset for scientific insight generation. This opportunity requires addressing very real data wrangling challenges.

May 14, 2020 — Modern clinical trials distribute samples to an expanding range of screening labs, specialty labs, and bio-banking facilities. Maintaining visibility into sample collection and data processing too often requires manually comparing inventories from each lab’s LIMS, and then checking against what is expected according to the protocol.

May 6, 2020 — Following Scott Marshall’s announcement last week about the QuartzBio team’s COVID-19-Related Data Aggregation Initiative, we wanted to share additional context behind the scope of our efforts. Our initial focus is creating a valuable and thoughtfully constructed data ecosystem, which will result in the ability to draw meaningful context. This is nucleated with published data from critical SARS-CoV-2 profiling experiments, that compare infection of cell line and animal models with novel coronavirus to other viruses like SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV and H1N1.