May 1st, 2020
Dear CRAC volunteers,
While the days seem to all be blending together, another week has passed since our last update, and we wanted to let you know what has happened in the interim. It seems as if we may finally have reached our cruising altitude and are now able to add about one project per week to our portfolio without staying up all night. While our non-project-specific volunteers have been able to take a small breath this week, our project managers and team members have been working as hard as ever.
One big new development is the “promotion” of Howie Wu to the exalted position of Chief Data Officer. This is really only putting a title on a role that Howie has clearly been playing since the earliest days of our group. In light of his highly active effort in overseeing multiple database projects and contributing to the overall leadership of CRAC Teams, we decided to make it official!
CRAC Teams continues to gain public traction: our organization was featured in a Zuckerman Institute podcast this week. Give it a listen here: https://zuckermaninstitute.columbia.edu/lab-time-coronavirus-scientists-mobilized.
Our blogging team has begun a series of posts highlighting the work of our volunteers. Read the first piece on our amazing volunteers at the Biobank here: https://columbiacovid.weebly.com/blog.
We are also looking for more volunteers for project 11, which consists of volunteering at NYP Hospitals to provide assistance with non-patient-facing activities. If you want more information and/or want to sign up, look here: https://forms.gle/sJu185NhEdJFWASx8.
Project Summaries
Project 1 - IRB. Please welcome our new project 1 manager, Radhika Desai! She will be taking over for Howie by the start of next week. Howie continues to oversee several other projects, showing us how productive we wish we could be.
Project 3 - Mask Reutilization:
The mask reutilization project is at full steam! We welcomed Jaeseung Hahn as our Communications manager, Tiffany Chen as our PPE user guidelines manager, and Keiko Yasuma as our At-Home mask decontamination member. We are working hard on surveying the literature for the At-home mask decontamination and PPE user guidelines projects. The PPE user guidelines team and the Communication team developed a survey to inform our efforts to create comprehensive guidelines for at-home mask usage and decontamination.
Project 4 - Biobanking: We welcomed two new members to our team: Drs. Panos Oikonomou and Chiara Camillo. Our volunteers have processed over 4000 samples since last update, reaching a total of almost 19000 samples since this effort kicked off one month ago. We are thrilled to announce that we have processed the first batch of cord blood (81 samples) this week. These samples will be used to assess viral load and antibody levels in order to learn about maternal/fetal transmissibility of sars-cov-2 as well as drugs used to treat the disease.
More exciting updates: Dr. Alberto Bartolomé-Herranz, one of our volunteers in the Biobank, has developed some useful tools for SARS-CoV-2 research and will be presenting them tomorrow at noon in a Zoom webinar hosted by the Pathology department (The Lipid Club). All welcome:
Project 5 - Rapid response: The rapid response team continues to serve on-call to assist CUIMC Research Operations in the event of equipment failures. If you encounter a freezer, LN2, incubator, or similar equipment failure, please do the following:
Project 7 - Serological Testing: Serology has tested about 1900 patients total in the last 10 days. Panos Oikonomou is now co-project manager for project 7.
Project 8 - Research Database: We launched the COVID database and also highlighted it during Wednesday’s symposium. We are working on identifying immediate priorities, including how to collect data for matching experts and encouraging non-respondents to submit their data. You can find the database here: https://research.columbia.edu/covid/covidhub. If you are working on a COVID19 project, please add your data (or ask the project lead to add the data) using the links on that page so the rest of the CU community can see all the great work you’re doing!
Project 9 - Symposia: CRAC Teams is continuing to assist with organization of the weekly virtual COVID-19 symposium at Columbia, in collaboration with Drs. Andrea Califano, Andy Marks and Eric Greene (https://zuckermaninstitute.columbia.edu/covid-19-virtual-symposium-series). We had our fifth consecutive meeting this week, and continue to have upwards of 600 attendees on average throughout the symposium. You can check out this and past weeks’ presentation videos here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_H_pQ44HPJ8vkJMGXfhSLdmzEsZ7OSro. If you work on COVID-19 related research we encourage you to sign up to speak! Sign up here: https://tinyurl.com/y75lwlcr
Project 11 - Hospital Assistance: This project is still going strong at all 5 hospitals, and we are looking for more volunteers. If you would like to volunteer, do so here: https://forms.gle/sJu185NhEdJFWASx8
Project 18 - Transplant Database: Our team has started testing the database and making tweaks to it. Overall the project is “looking great” and fulfilling its mission!
Project 19 - NYP Clinical Pharmacy: We are still looking for a pharmacist to help. No PharmD needed. Let us know if you qualify!
Project 20 - Institutional Biosafety Committee: Volunteers have been assisting with project vetting meetings.
Project 21 - CCU Data Handling: Our team has joined the overall effort in cleaning the data.
Project 22 - Precision Genomics lab: The precision genomics volunteers transferred ~760 samples this week.
Project 23 - Clinical Trial Finder: We officially launched project 23 this week with Dr. Chunhua Weng in the Department of Biomedical Informatics as the faculty lead and Alex Butler as the project manager! The Clinical Trial Finder is an online tool to allow clinicians, patients, or healthy volunteers to search for nearby clinical trials. It will allow users to answer short medical questions to help identify trials that they may be eligible for. This tool includes all clinical trials run in the United States and remains up-to-date with bi- or tri-weekly data downloads. Right now, Alex is working with our personnel managers to identify potential volunteers and potential needs.
Blog: the first blog on the biobank was uploaded on the 1-month anniversary of CRAC. Second (on P11) and third (P7) blogs are under way.
CRAC Teams
Dear CRAC volunteers,
While the days seem to all be blending together, another week has passed since our last update, and we wanted to let you know what has happened in the interim. It seems as if we may finally have reached our cruising altitude and are now able to add about one project per week to our portfolio without staying up all night. While our non-project-specific volunteers have been able to take a small breath this week, our project managers and team members have been working as hard as ever.
One big new development is the “promotion” of Howie Wu to the exalted position of Chief Data Officer. This is really only putting a title on a role that Howie has clearly been playing since the earliest days of our group. In light of his highly active effort in overseeing multiple database projects and contributing to the overall leadership of CRAC Teams, we decided to make it official!
CRAC Teams continues to gain public traction: our organization was featured in a Zuckerman Institute podcast this week. Give it a listen here: https://zuckermaninstitute.columbia.edu/lab-time-coronavirus-scientists-mobilized.
Our blogging team has begun a series of posts highlighting the work of our volunteers. Read the first piece on our amazing volunteers at the Biobank here: https://columbiacovid.weebly.com/blog.
We are also looking for more volunteers for project 11, which consists of volunteering at NYP Hospitals to provide assistance with non-patient-facing activities. If you want more information and/or want to sign up, look here: https://forms.gle/sJu185NhEdJFWASx8.
Project Summaries
Project 1 - IRB. Please welcome our new project 1 manager, Radhika Desai! She will be taking over for Howie by the start of next week. Howie continues to oversee several other projects, showing us how productive we wish we could be.
Project 3 - Mask Reutilization:
The mask reutilization project is at full steam! We welcomed Jaeseung Hahn as our Communications manager, Tiffany Chen as our PPE user guidelines manager, and Keiko Yasuma as our At-Home mask decontamination member. We are working hard on surveying the literature for the At-home mask decontamination and PPE user guidelines projects. The PPE user guidelines team and the Communication team developed a survey to inform our efforts to create comprehensive guidelines for at-home mask usage and decontamination.
Project 4 - Biobanking: We welcomed two new members to our team: Drs. Panos Oikonomou and Chiara Camillo. Our volunteers have processed over 4000 samples since last update, reaching a total of almost 19000 samples since this effort kicked off one month ago. We are thrilled to announce that we have processed the first batch of cord blood (81 samples) this week. These samples will be used to assess viral load and antibody levels in order to learn about maternal/fetal transmissibility of sars-cov-2 as well as drugs used to treat the disease.
More exciting updates: Dr. Alberto Bartolomé-Herranz, one of our volunteers in the Biobank, has developed some useful tools for SARS-CoV-2 research and will be presenting them tomorrow at noon in a Zoom webinar hosted by the Pathology department (The Lipid Club). All welcome:
- Laura Beth McIntire is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
- Topic: Columbia Lipid Club-SARS-CoV2
- Time: May 1, 2020 12:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
- Join Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82395529365
Project 5 - Rapid response: The rapid response team continues to serve on-call to assist CUIMC Research Operations in the event of equipment failures. If you encounter a freezer, LN2, incubator, or similar equipment failure, please do the following:
- Contact CU Facilities Compliance to request access to a backup freezer at 212-305-8100, via Public Safety. Provide the name, UNI, and contact number of the lab manager responsible and the location of the failed freezer.
- Follow-up the call with an email (24/7) to [email protected]
- The lab manager’s ID badge will be activated for access to the backup freezer location.
Project 7 - Serological Testing: Serology has tested about 1900 patients total in the last 10 days. Panos Oikonomou is now co-project manager for project 7.
Project 8 - Research Database: We launched the COVID database and also highlighted it during Wednesday’s symposium. We are working on identifying immediate priorities, including how to collect data for matching experts and encouraging non-respondents to submit their data. You can find the database here: https://research.columbia.edu/covid/covidhub. If you are working on a COVID19 project, please add your data (or ask the project lead to add the data) using the links on that page so the rest of the CU community can see all the great work you’re doing!
Project 9 - Symposia: CRAC Teams is continuing to assist with organization of the weekly virtual COVID-19 symposium at Columbia, in collaboration with Drs. Andrea Califano, Andy Marks and Eric Greene (https://zuckermaninstitute.columbia.edu/covid-19-virtual-symposium-series). We had our fifth consecutive meeting this week, and continue to have upwards of 600 attendees on average throughout the symposium. You can check out this and past weeks’ presentation videos here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_H_pQ44HPJ8vkJMGXfhSLdmzEsZ7OSro. If you work on COVID-19 related research we encourage you to sign up to speak! Sign up here: https://tinyurl.com/y75lwlcr
Project 11 - Hospital Assistance: This project is still going strong at all 5 hospitals, and we are looking for more volunteers. If you would like to volunteer, do so here: https://forms.gle/sJu185NhEdJFWASx8
Project 18 - Transplant Database: Our team has started testing the database and making tweaks to it. Overall the project is “looking great” and fulfilling its mission!
Project 19 - NYP Clinical Pharmacy: We are still looking for a pharmacist to help. No PharmD needed. Let us know if you qualify!
Project 20 - Institutional Biosafety Committee: Volunteers have been assisting with project vetting meetings.
Project 21 - CCU Data Handling: Our team has joined the overall effort in cleaning the data.
Project 22 - Precision Genomics lab: The precision genomics volunteers transferred ~760 samples this week.
Project 23 - Clinical Trial Finder: We officially launched project 23 this week with Dr. Chunhua Weng in the Department of Biomedical Informatics as the faculty lead and Alex Butler as the project manager! The Clinical Trial Finder is an online tool to allow clinicians, patients, or healthy volunteers to search for nearby clinical trials. It will allow users to answer short medical questions to help identify trials that they may be eligible for. This tool includes all clinical trials run in the United States and remains up-to-date with bi- or tri-weekly data downloads. Right now, Alex is working with our personnel managers to identify potential volunteers and potential needs.
Blog: the first blog on the biobank was uploaded on the 1-month anniversary of CRAC. Second (on P11) and third (P7) blogs are under way.
CRAC Teams
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