How scientists launched a study in days to probe COVID-19’s unpredictability

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On a Friday afternoon in mid-March 2020, as the emergency department at Massachusetts General Hospital began admitting its first coronavirus patients, attending emergency physician and researcher Michael Filbin recognized an urgent need to quickly learn about the emerging pathogen. With a surge of COVID-19 patients expected in the hospital in the coming weeks, Filbin decided to assemble a team of researchers to answer a key question that made the illness so hard to treat: why is the disease mild for some, yet deadly for others? To generate enough data to answer that question, the researchers would need to enroll COVID-19 patients in a study during the coming surge, which meant they’d need to plan and launch the study in record time.

The hospital’s emergency preparedness team had just informed Filbin that clinical research studies, including his investigations into the life-threatening condition known as sepsis, would be paused so that medical teams could focus on the anticipated rise in COVID-19 cases. Filbin realized that the existing workflows he and his collaborators at Mass General and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard had been using for the past two years to study the immune response to sepsis were ideally suited to study COVID-19 and how the body responds to the infection.

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