Biogen employees, family members infected with coronavirus asked to contribute blood samples to help build COVID-19 biobank

Employees of Biogen, the company whose managers’ meeting in February became a super spreader event for coronavirus in Massachusetts, is now asking employees who were infected with COVID-19 to contribute blood samples for a biobank.

Biogen, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Partners HealthCare announced a consortium that will build and share a COVID-19 biobank.

There were several top managers of Biogen at a late February meeting at the Boston Marriott Long Wharf hotel. The managers, roughly 175, were able to leave Boston and spread the virus without knowing. Cases outside of Massachusetts popped up in connection with the conference including North Carolina, Tennessee and Indiana.

At one point, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health was including the number of COVID-19 cases connected to Biogen in the daily release of statistics.

The biobank will be used for scientists to study blood samples to search for potential vaccines and treatments, according to a news release.

“Biogen will help employees who wish to volunteer connect with the project,” the company said. “The volunteers are among the first people in Massachusetts to be diagnosed with and recover from COVID-19, as well as close contacts of those individuals, including people who were not tested or who may not have had symptoms.”

The clustered group of patients with a common exposure could offer valuable information into why some people showed signs of the virus while others were asymptomatic.

A study of the samples also may help researchers understand why some people had more severe symptoms compared to others.

The more than 100 people infected at the Biogen conference have recovered and researchers are looking to examine the blood samples from those recovered patients to evaluate the levels of neutralizing antibodies.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has had a very direct, very personal impact on our Biogen community,” said Dr. Maha Radhakrishnan, Chief Medical Officer at Biogen, a Cambridge-based company. “We are uniquely positioned to contribute to advancing COVID-19 science in an organized and deliberate way so we can all gain a better understanding of this virus. Many Biogen colleagues have been eager to find ways to help others during this pandemic, and it is our hope that this biobank will provide hope and essential information during this difficult time. It is an opportunity to activate and bring together our commitment to science with the needs of humanity, and we are proud to participate.”

Partners HealthCare, Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital are coordinating the outreach and sample collection effort from Biogen employees who contracted and have recovered from COVID-19, as well as people identified as close contacts of those individuals, regardless of whether they were confirmed as having COVID-19.

The biobank will create an “anonymous medical and biological data set that has the potential to shed light on the biology of the virus and illuminate pathways for potential vaccines, treatments, and other breakthroughs,” the press release said.

It will also store frozen samples for possible future research.

“Biogen will have the same level of access to the biobank as researchers around the world, which means it will not have access to identifiable information, nor will the company know which employees and close contacts volunteered to participate,” the company wrote.

Biogen said the collaboration began when several employees, while recovering from COVID-19, began thinking of ways to help. Company leaders then reached out to several partners in the hospital and biomedical community.

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