UCI Nabs $500K Grant For COVID Data Collab

The University of California, Irvine is spearheading an effort to share COVID-19 patient information across five UC health centers with the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.
 
The initiative, which is expected to help clinicians and researchers further their understanding of the infectious disease, is supported by a $500,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health.
 
UCI will facilitate the transfer of de-identified data on patient age, sex, weight, zip code, medical conditions into an analytics platform called N3C Data Enclave.
 
“The huge value of this large database is identifying the risk factors,” said Dan Cooper, associate vice chancellor for clinical and translational science at UCI.
“There may be medications that are being given out that actually improve the condition.”

The N3C was created last June, and its data enclave has already collected records from more than 1 million COVID patients and nearly 548 million clinical observations.
 
The collaborative considers a wide range of circumstances including comorbidities and prescription medications that could impact a response to COVID and lead to adverse events such as kidney failure.
 
Data contributions are expected to continue for five years as researchers grapple with immediate and emerging questions such as how patients respond to COVID vaccines and how many patients have symptoms that linger for months.