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CU Anschutz COVIDome Project aimed at speeding lifesaving treatment
Researchers from across campus join in creation of online portal to serve as an open science ‘path to discovery’
Last spring, as healthcare providers and scientists around the world scrambled to treat a surge of patients infected with a virus that experts knew little about, one thing quickly became clear: SARS-CoV-2 strikes people differently.
Faced with solving a mega-puzzle on a timer when minutes cost lives, clinical practice early in the pandemic became a fervent game of trial and error.
Now, on the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, where the then-new Vice Chancellor for Research Thomas Flaig, MD, had the fortitude and resources to create a biobank of samples from some of the state’s first COVID-19 patients, a promising venture has sprung.
Among groups at higher risk of dying from COVID-19, such as people with diabetes, people with DS stand out: If infected, they are five times more likely to be hospitalized and 10 times more likely to die than the general population, according to a large U.K. study published in October. Other recent studies back up the high risk.
Researchers suspect background immune abnormalities, combined with extra copies of key genes in people with DS who have three copies of chromosome 21 rather than the usual two make them more vulnerable to severe COVID-19. “This is a vulnerable population that may need protective policies put in place,” says Julia Hippisley-Cox, a clinical epidemiologist at the University of Oxford’s medical school and senior author on the U.K. study.