Dr. Michael Mina of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, supported by OpenResearch, Project Covalence and TrialSpark, announces enrollment of first 500 patients of a COVID-19 serological surveillance study

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Jul 21, 2020, 08:00 ET

NEW YORK, July 21, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Dr. Michael Mina of the Harvard T. Chan School of Public Health announced today the successful enrollment of the first 500 patients just 10 days after launching a COVID-19 longitudinal serological surveillance study using the Project Covalence trial platform.

This study aims to estimate the true prevalence of COVID-19 in the general population and to investigate the role of COVID-19 antibodies and what protection they may offer. Gathering serological antibody data is essential to understanding the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and for making informed decisions about safely reopening society.

The study is run on TrialSpark's Covalence platform with funding support from Sam Altman and Open Research. The Covalence platform provides the infrastructure for researchers to rapidly spin up COVID-19 studies and is optimized for trials conducted in an outpatient setting or at the patient home.

The principal investigator, Dr. Michael Mina, MD/PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and a physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He has been at the forefront of the response to COVID-19 since the virus emerged, and has advised governments and institutions in the U.S. and internationally.

"Longitudinal serological surveillance is a critical component of the public health response to a pandemic pathogen like SARS-CoV-2. The data these types of serological surveys provide informs everything from the prevalence of infection and risk factors associated with spread to the hospitalization and mortality rates that occur following infection. These data are, in many ways, the missing pieces to help understand the optimal methods of control and reopening strategies associated with this pandemic," said Mina. "The Covalence platform that TrialSpark has built has been tremendously useful to accelerate the research that we are performing now and need to continue building over the coming months and years. In the future, I can imagine the Covalence platform as an ideal environment for vaccine and therapeutic studies that will need to be initiated quickly and effectively."

This platform has been set up and allows serological studies to be easily deployed in states across the country that will provide policy leaders and public health officials with real-time information on spread and effectiveness of control policies. Dr. Mina hopes to expand this longitudinal study to other states beyond Massachusetts and is seeking partners, government and private partnerships, funders and other collaborators.

For those interested in getting involved, please contact [email protected].

About Project Covalence

Project Covalence is a collaboration between tech entrepreneur Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, physician-scientist Dr. Mark C. Fishman, Harvard professor and Founding President of the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, and TrialSpark. It is designed as a turnkey trial platform that enables investigators and sponsors to rapidly launch clinical trials for COVID-19, optimized for community-based or at-home studies.

About TrialSpark
TrialSpark is a technology company that runs end-to-end clinical trials as an alternative to a traditional CRO. TrialSpark partners with doctors to create trial sites within their existing practices and runs trials out of these sites using a roaming cohort of research coordinators, optimized by software, data, and technology. By creating trial sites with doctors, TrialSpark unlocks the 99% of patients who traditionally haven't been able to participate in trials, boosting recruitment rates and democratizing access. TrialSpark is backed by leading investors such as Michael Moritz, John Doerr, Thrive Capital, and Sequoia Capital.

For press inquiries, please contact [email protected].

SOURCE TrialSpark