Province is collecting COVID-19 samples to help fight next wave

Alberta laboratory workers are fighting fire with fire in defeating COVID -19.

The ammunition they’re using is the contagion itself, drawn from patients and stored at -80 C in huge, high-tech refrigerators at the University of Calgary and at Edmonton’s University of Alberta Hospital.

Steadily filling up these bio-repositories are blood samples drawn from patients who’ve tested positive for COVID-19 — 5,000 of them so far — and at least as many swabs, tissue, urine draws and negative results.

They’re being tapped by 30 Alberta research projects hunting down treatments, vaccines and diagnostic technology to help beat back the disease that has taken the lives of more than 7,700 Canadians, at least 146 Albertans and more than 383,000 worldwide.

Samples are collected from mobile testing sites, clinics and hospitals under a system spanning the province and many of its health care agencies under a philosophy of efficiency and seizing an opportunity, said Dr. Michael Mengel, north sector medical director for Alberta Precision Labs.

“We want to retain from every patient who’s tested positive, and we have something left over,” said Mengel.

“Now we have these requests from researchers and we don’t have to go back and poke these patients for samples again.”

Those samples are gingerly collected in 0.5-ml tubes and secured behind heavy, locked freezer doors accessed only by authorized personnel.

Some likely come from patients who ultimately died from the contagion, making an unintentional sacrifice that could help head off a potential second wave of the novel coronavirus, said Mengel.

“That’s a fair assumption, but these are samples that would have been collected regardless,” he said.

Patients testing positive yield more than one sample so multiple researchers can benefit from that person.

One of the mysteries that blood, swabs and tissue could unlock is the potency of the virus itself, he said.

“It can study the genetics — why are some patients more sick than others?” said Mengel, adding the sources of samples used by researchers are kept anonymous unless special consent is sought.

“For some people who have COVID, six or 12 months later, we can look for certain markers of how their blood has changed.”

So far, tests have been conducted on more than 248,000 Albertans, with nearly 7,000 of those coming back positive.

Now that COVID-19 research has been boosted by hundreds of millions of dollars in federal and local funding, said Mengel, the demand for the contents of those tubes collected through the $300,000 effort has soared.

Alberta’s better positioned to pursue this kind of cooperative collection system than other provinces due to its integrated health care system, he said.

“We’re unique in having an integrated system across the province that we can pull it off,” said Mengel.

Health foundations, trusts and academics have banded together to compile, store and distribute the fruits of Alberta’s COVID-19 testing, said Calgary Health Trust president Mike Meldrum.

“Calgary Health Trust and our donors recognize that targeted research is needed to enhance our understanding of this highly contagious virus and to accelerate the discovery of effective diagnostics, treatments, and prevention for current and future outbreaks,” he said.

The effort is expected to last one year, said Mengel.