Patients’ samples to help battle 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 -80C 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 have 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 has 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-millilitre tubes and secured behind locked freezer doors.

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

Patients testing positive yield more than one sample, so multiple researchers can study that person’s infection.

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

“It can study the genetics — why are some patients more sick than others?” said Mengel.

So far, tests have been conducted on more than 248,000 Albertans, with nearly 7,100 of those coming back positive.