COVID-19 has caused the greatest pandemic in living memory. Alongside providing excellent clinical care in the most challenging of environments, there is also a critical need for clinical research to better understand this disease. This will equip us to better deal with the current pandemic as well future ones.

We need to establish why some people develop severe disease and others never get ill despite infection. We need to know whether there are targets for drug development to treat the disease or to give people who are exposed. We will look at genetic influences and immunology (including prior protective viral exposure), seek neutralising antibodies, understand the cellular responses and assess ethnic and sociological factors – all by collecting a biorepository of over 200,000 samples taken from our own healthcare staff weekly over the next 4 months. These samples will then be divided up and sent to the UKs best academic and pharmaceutical research institutions for collaborative, swift science maximising the yield of the consortium to answer the questions in such urgent need of answers.

Dr Charlotte Manisty, Professor James Moon and their team embarked on a pioneering project with Barts NHS Health Trust, in collaboration with University College London (UCL) and Queen Mary’s University London (QMLU). Their research focused on gathering blood samples and health data from frontline healthcare workers, rather than patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19. This was because healthcare workers have high exposure rates to the disease – it also allows researchers to compare samples from each person before, during and after their exposure to COVID-19, and to investigate the disease in people who develop only mild symptoms or are asymptomatic.