The La Jolla, Calif.-based Scripps Research has become the latest member of the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C), a program focused on building a centralized national data resource from COVID-19 patients’ medical record data that the research community can use to study the disease.
The N3C initiative is led by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and funded by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. The program harnesses the resources of the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) Program and its National Center for Data to Health (CD2H). NIH researchers believe that while vast amounts of clinical data are being generated that could be used to advance research efforts focused on COVID-19, these datasets housed in EHRs often become too large to share and the networks for data management are so dissimilar that they cannot be combined easily, creating roadblocks along the path to developing new treatments.
As such, with no standardized way to collect and harmonize all this data being generated, a COVID-19 analytics platform that has the ability turn all this data into new knowledge that can speed research efforts has become an “urgent need,” the researchers say.
N3C, a centralized, secure portal for hosting COVID-19 clinical data, will accept data via multiple data models and transform them into a common analytic model. The cloud-based collaborative portal will be designed to enable development of machine learning and other informatics tools that require a large row-level dataset, and will be overseen by a data access committee. N3C is a secure portal not only for access by clinicians wanting to ask specific questions, but also for informaticians supplying new algorithms for their evaluation, as stated by the CD2H Program Director, Melissa Haendel, Ph.D., of the Oregon Health & Science University, in an April Healthcare Innovation story.
Now, Scripps Research, which is both a member of the CTSA Program consortium—forming the “Scripps CTSA hub” along with the local Scripps Health healthcare system—and part of the informatics community behind CD2H, will be joining the initiative. Fifteen other institutions have agreed to contribute data thus far, including Oregon Health & Science University and John Hopkins University. The collaborative is supported as part of a $25 million NIH award to the National Center for Data to Health, which is coordinating the collaborative's efforts and is based at Oregon Health & Science University's Oregon Clinical and Translational Research Institute.
Scripps officials contend the platform “will enable new machine learning technologies and rigorous statistical analyses to answer key questions around predicting patient responses to therapies, identifying novel drugs and treatments, and finding other indicators that may inform clinical decision making.”
Chunlei Wu, Ph.D., associate professor of integrative structural and computational biology and the Scripps Research principal investigator for CD2H, noted in a press release that “During the public health crisis brought on by COVID-19, the CTSA and CD2H networks are uniquely able to translate data into medical knowledge that could help bring this pandemic to an end. The new N3C initiative exemplifies the shared commitment of this community to make data more open and accessible to scientists everywhere.”
Wu’s team will be tasked with co-leading efforts to develop and deploy machine learning and other analytical tools and methods to address key clinical and translational questions.
“Scripps Health is committed to making de-identified clinical data broadly available to the research community in order to accelerate scientific research for COVID-19,” added Athena Philis-Tsimikas, M.D., corporate vice president of the Scripps Whittier Diabetes Institute. “As a community health system, we play an important role in empowering scientists with information that can directly impact patient care.”
