In January of 2020 public health officials began warning that a virulent new respiratory illness caused by a novel coronavirus was spreading in multiple countries and threatening to evolve into a global pandemic. Harvard University quickly mobilized its leadership and, soon thereafter, the regional biomedical community to formulate and fund a research and clinical response to this new pathogen, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and the disease, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). A consortium of 18 different institutions rapidly convened, involving investigators and clinicians at all four Massachusetts medical schools (Harvard, Boston University, Tufts, and the University of Massachusetts), their affiliated hospitals and research institutes, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and colleagues from local foundations, government agencies, and biotechnology companies. This entity, the Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness (MassCPR, https://masscpr.hms.harvard.edu/), was an unprecedented effort to marshal a coordinated response to an emerging public health calamity. In its first three years, MassCPR investigators have been responsible for numerous advances in understanding disease transmission,
pathogenesis, immunity, and clinical management, and consortium members have played major roles in the scientific formulation and clinical testing of the Moderna and Janssen/J&J vaccines. MassCPR has pioneered an organizational structure that encourages scientists to work with a more open, collaborative, and less competitive spirit by fostering partnerships that reward generation of transformative knowledge for the benefit of humanity. This chapter highlights the organization, outcomes, and lessons learned from MassCPR’s first phase and sets the stage for ensuring greater preparedness for future public health threats.

Two days after the first case of the “2019 novel coronavirus” was confirmed in Massachusetts,¹ a group of Harvard University faculty and administrators gathered on February 3, 2020, in a small conference room for a live video conference with faculty at the Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Health (GIRH) in Guangdong Province, China. The group in China was led by Dr. Zhong Nanshan, internationally known for his role in managing the SARS outbreak years earlier.² The connection to our international colleagues at GIRH would remain an important communication channel for many months to come, as we openly exchanged critical knowledge regarding clinical management and approaches to pandemic-related research. The meeting with GIRH had been arranged by the China Evergrande Group, a corporation that had supported multiple academic programs at Harvard,³ including the Evergrande Center for Immunologic Diseases, a joint endeavor involving Harvard Medical School (HMS) and Brigham and Women’s Hospital (see: https://evergrande.hms.harvard.edu/home).

Over the course of several hours during our February 3rd meeting, the physicians and researchers at GIRH relayed a harrowing tale of massive numbers of patients in Wuhan, Hubei Province, succumbing to a previously unencountered, highly aggressive coronavirus-mediated pneumonia bearing similarities to SARS, but with distinct features. Already, widespread lockdowns were in place across Hubei, but the number of deaths was rising, and area healthcare systems were operating in a mode of crisis standards of care.

Beyond relaying first-hand information about the evolving urgency in China, the GIRH medical team was seeking assistance with interpreting unique clinical features and findings and recruiting international colleagues to turn their attention to the rapid development of diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines. Affected persons in China needed immediate assistance, and they warned it was likely only a matter of time before the disease would become rampant in other parts of the world. The China Evergrande Group provided funding to launch urgent, COVID-19-related research and clinical management endeavors at both GIRH and Harvard.⁴

During the next three weeks, the Harvard leadership team began contacting colleagues across the greater Boston biomedical community in the fields of infectious disease, virology, pulmonology, immunology, pathology, vaccine development, diagnostics, and other areas of research and clinical practice at all four Massachusetts medical schools, their academic medical centers and research institutes, in key nodes of activity at departments of public health and national/international research organizations, and within the private sector. It soon became clear that, although a small but growing number of clinicians, researchers, and individuals previously working in other fields were turning their attention to what was at that time still known as nCoV-2019, no organizing body existed to synergize efforts and support operational efficiency among groups and institutions. A coordinating center had the potential to capitalize on the enormous talent in our region by serving as a convener as well as a clearinghouse of information, funding, and reagents to accelerate pandemic-related medical research and development. Simultaneously, we began an effort to procure significant philanthropic funding to catalyze the research efforts that would be required.

On March 2, 2020, the date on which the second case of COVID-19 was identified in Massachusetts,⁵ nearly 100 individuals gathered at HMS for a half-day scientific workshop⁶ to review current information and to organize a coordinated effort (Figure 18.1). The workshop convened top scientists and clinical care experts from Harvard, its affiliated teaching hospitals and research institutes, MIT, Boston University, Tufts University, the University of Massachusetts-Worcester, the
Gates Medical Research Institute, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, and several biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. The gathering was likely the first time the greater Boston biomedical community had assembled in such numbers to collectively confront an emerging threat. March 2nd would also mark the one and only time the group met in-person over a roughly two-and-a-half-year period, as social distancing and campus shutdowns rapidly ensued across the region and the world. The March 2nd meeting was the genesis of what would soon thereafter be dubbed the “Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness,” with HMS as the central coordinating and funding institution.

Scientific workshops and symposia typically involve many months of advance preparation, mapping of themes and sessions, scheduling of speakers, booking venues and support services, and attending to all the other details that make for an effective and informative experience. Facing the urgency of a looming pandemic, however, there was little time for extensive workshop planning. We would have to build it as we went along.

In anticipation of the March 2, 2020, workshop, thought was given to features and approaches that were likely to dominate the coming pandemic. These included clinical management, diagnostics, epidemiology, pathogenesis, therapeutics, and vaccines.

These broad categories served as organizing themes for individual, 30-minute plenary sessions that were led by teams of two subject matter experts. Each plenary coleader kicked off their individual session by offering a brief set of framing comments based on their expertise as well as the
current state of pandemic-related knowledge. Open discussion followed on each plenary topic, in which individuals throughout the larger room shared their most pressing questions, observations, and predictions. The urgency of the situation was made clear by the presence of our GIRH colleagues participating by video feed.

After these plenary sessions, workshop participants were invited to self-assemble at one of six large tables representing the thematic areas. Each table hosted a simultaneous, live discussion from which a basic framework emerged that mapped out the essential elements to be initially considered/undertaken within each thematic area. These six areas would later become the core working groups (WGs) of the MassCPR (see later), each representing a principal area of focus that continues to define our efforts to this day.

As the simultaneous sessions were underway, three of us in the HMS administration gathered in the back of the room to discuss what we were seeing and hearing. A few things were apparent. First, the discussions at each of the tables were intense and engaging. It was clear that exceptional talent and experience had been assembled in the room and a collective commitment to working together was emerging. Every conversation we had heard was accomplishing exactly what we hoped—to identify the most pressing elements of focus within each thematic area.

It rapidly became clear that the effort needed an organizing structure that would endure beyond the day’s session so that the nascent working relationships emerging across the room could be nurtured and supported, both materially and intellectually, throughout the coming pandemic. Although those of us who were gathered in our mid-meeting “huddle” had a great deal of combined experience in establishing and operating biomedical research–related endeavors, none of us had previously organized anything with the multi-institutional scale envisioned, especially given the short timeline before us. The situation was unprecedented. At that moment, we needed only to commit ourselves to try. The group emerged from the meeting with an organizational structure and a plan for launching arguably the most rapid (and far-reaching) request for proposals (RFPs) in our institution’s history.

The MassCPR partnering institutions are:

The organization and function of MassCPR’s elements will be described in the next section, in part by paraphrasing language contained within an informal consortium agreement that was drafted in the earliest days of MassCPR’s development.

Government funding is the backbone of biomedical research nationwide. However, the timelines associated with typical grant composition, submission, review, and awarding are simply incompatible with the nature of a burgeoning crisis like the earliest months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The esprit de corps and research collaborations, as well as the individual and institutional selflessness that defined MassCPR’s rapid response, would not have been possible without philanthropic investments that allowed HMS to quickly distribute funding to the development of shared community resources and to teams of investigators and care providers from across the consortium.

Harvard University took the lead in organizing fundraising efforts, which were joined by other consortium institutions, most notably the Ragon Institute, as each leveraged their networks of long-standing and new supporters to gather the resources needed to implement the plans developed during the March 2nd workshop. Because of the early financial support of the China Evergrande Group⁶ and others who were MassCPR’s initial contributors, by April 21, 2020, MassCPR had progressed from mapping out areas of initial focus to awarding $17.5 million in total research funding to 63 projects across 15 consortium institutions in its first tranche of awards alone. Including non-consortium institutions that received subawards, 38 total institutions were involved in these projects.

As of May 2021, the MassCPR Donor Honor Roll numbered over 100 individuals, organizations, trusts, foundations, and other types of contributors (see: https://masscpr.hms.harvard.edu/donors). Some contributors gave a million dollars or more, whereas others donated less than one hundred dollars. The generosity shown to MassCPR at all levels of philanthropic support directly enabled the consortium.

The ability to rapidly deploy funding was essential to launching MassCPR’s early activities. Early funding not only directly facilitated COVID-19-related research projects and community resources but, in so doing, poised MassCPR as well as individually funded recipients and groups of recipients to apply for additional, follow-on support from other foundation and government sources. The funding funneled through MassCPR not only increased biomedical research capacity but also supported job retention within Massachusetts at a time when many organizations were furloughing workers as COVID-19-related shutdowns ensued.

As an example of how funding from the earliest philanthropic partners was leveraged to immediate effect, once an operational framework was in place and the first MassCPR awards were being granted across the community, the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center (MLSC) soon thereafter generously provided an additional $2.3 million of support for specific MassCPR projects and community resources.⁷ Among other areas, MLSC support bolstered COVID-19 clinical biospecimen acquisition, processing, banking, and distribution across the consortium by providing a match for MassCPR’s own allocation. This effectively doubled the support provided to the burgeoning biobanks of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Tufts Medical Center, and Boston Medical Center; other MassCPR funds were leveraged to enhance the biobank support at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Ragon Institute.

As MassCPR’s central coordinating institution, Harvard raised funds which it then deployed to institutions across the entire consortium, including those with which Harvard has no formal affiliation. Such efforts stand as a testament to the power of working with a common cause as well as the value of service, of putting shared benefit ahead of individual or institutional gain.

On March 17, 2020, HMS announced what we believe to be the most accelerated RFP in its history (see: https://masscpr.hms.harvard.edu/rfp). With the pandemic smoldering but threatening a conflagration, applicants were given only one week to prepare and submit applications (see later). Despite this very short turnaround time, an overwhelming 448 submissions were received from investigators across Massachusetts. By funding research across the consortium, Harvard prioritized shared progress over proprietary financial interests—a necessary decision in service of advancing the scientific
understanding of the novel coronavirus so that effective vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics could be developed and deployed as quickly as possible.

Importantly, in addition to aligning the scientists themselves, Harvard invested in enabling technologies so that researchers had the tools needed to generate solutions and the frameworks required for a massively coordinated response. As noted earlier, scientific leadership and management ensured alignment on goals, access to platforms and services, exchange of materials and data, engagement with the scientific community through weekly WG meetings, accountability and oversight, and prudent capital allocation. In short, Harvard created a new model—under enormous time pressure and highly compromised working conditions—to mount a coordinated response that benefited all consortium members and prioritized impact over institutional interests.

Among the first efforts organized by MassCPR was coordination of the collection and distribution of COVID-19 patient (clinical) specimens across our consortium. In the earliest days of the pandemic, the situation at our affiliated hospitals was likely the same as what could be found at any large, academic medical center elsewhere in the country: emergency rooms and intensive care units were overflowing. Patients fell across a spectrum of clinical severity, ranging from fear and concern over possible infection, to those experiencing active disease but who were otherwise stable, to others with advanced disease who were in need of ventilation and intensive care, to individuals who were near death because of the complications of terminal, multisystem infection, often in the context of an ever-growing list of comorbidities. Boston was among those cities that established an emergency field hospital to assist with managing overflowing numbers of patients.⁸

Researchers seeking access to clinical specimens amid such dire circumstances were, understandably, often precluded from patient contact while medical teams prioritized patient care above all else. Even in the setting of a public health emergency, researchers had to conform with ethical principles that demand proper informed consent for research subjects. Urgent, immediate patient care needs had to be weighed against the imperative to perform essential research to identify new treatments and to ensure deeper understanding of disease mechanisms. Despite the crush of individuals presenting with active infection, the flow of primary biospecimens was initially little more than a trickle to teams working to better understand the disease, develop vaccines and therapeutics, and assist in guiding the greater public health response locally, regionally, and nationally.

The ability to obtain patient-related specimens from international locations was likewise compromised by widespread travel and shipping restrictions as nations attempted to control the spread of COVID-19 into and beyond their borders. Clearly, a coordinated effort was needed. Ideally, it would entail a primary specimen acquisition approach that limited the numbers of individuals entering areas of active patient care and would present patients with a single, universally accepted consent form. Such a consent form would need to bear sufficient detail but with a requisite generality, including for the many types of specimens sought (eg, serum, sputum, whole blood, feces, and breast milk, among others), and to permit specimen use in any one of a number of needed areas. Specimen acquisition additionally had to be accomplished in a way that permitted sufficiently broad, yet coordinated, sample distribution so as to facilitate research across our entire, multi-institutional consortium. What’s more, distribution would best be managed in a way that curtailed or eliminated redundancy so that work was done quickly, efficiently, and with as little specimen wastage as possible.

Biospecimens were ultimately collected in such a manner at several clinical sites: Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), Boston Medical Center (BMC), Massachusetts General Brigham (MGB, including Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital), the Ragon Institute (Ragon), Tufts Medical Center (TMC), and the University of Massachusetts Medical Center (UMass). Certain MassCPR institutions were further ahead in this endeavor, whereas others were starting more from scratch, as they previously had only a small clinical biobank or even none at all.

Biosamples were shared broadly both within the collecting institutions and with other MassCPR clinical sites and nonclinical institutions, such as Boston University, the Broad Institute, Harvard Chan School of Public Health, MIT, and Tufts University. Specimens included blood (plasma, serum, peripheral blood mononuclear cells), respiratory (sputum, saliva, nasopharyngeal swabs), stool, and urine samples. Rather than creating one central repository to store all samples, a “federated” model developed in which biospecimens were retained at the collecting hospital and yet shared with investigators across the MassCPR. Because of the varied geographic areas and patient populations of each biobanking institution’s affiliated facilities, the samples gathered reflected unique, local patient populations with different socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic demographics. Thousands of clinical specimens have been distributed thus far resulting from MassCPR’s work in this area, including for projects involving diagnostic platform development, antibody-based therapeutics, T-cell responses in COVID-19, and preclinical vaccine development for the Janssen/J&J Ad26 vaccine, among many other scientific areas.

It is important to take a moment to shed additional light on how this coordinated effort was realized. Readers will recognize that tension exists within individual patient care centers when it comes to obtaining and sharing patient-derived biospecimens, in that consent forms are often narrowly defined to limit specimen use to the institutions where they are collected. Also, given the extremely high volume of patients entering clinical care centers described earlier, one could envision an added layer of disincentive for any research team that was able to obtain biomaterial to then share such precious specimens with others.

We circumvented these various obstacles as follows. First, MassCPR funded multiple studies that recruited cohorts at clinical sites, and sample sharing was a contractual requirement for accepting the funds. Awards were given with the understanding that 50% of each sample collected would be retained by the institution and the remaining 50% would be available for sharing within the consortium. This incentivized individual investigators to continue to obtain biospecimens and to share them with colleagues elsewhere across the consortium. These early patient cohorts included individuals with COVID-19 as well as uninfected high-risk persons (eg, healthcare workers).

A Sample Access Accelerator Committee (SAAC), cochaired by Howard Heller (MGH) and David Walt (BWH), was established with 17 representatives from 13 of the MassCPR institutions. The SAAC fostered collaboration by creating a common framework for obtaining, banking, and distributing COVID-19 clinical specimens in a transparent, fair, and prioritized manner across the member institutions.

Clinical specimens were all obtained via IRB-approved protocols and banked in various forms in a distributed manner across consortium member institutions, including as plasma, low-density peripheral blood mononuclear cells, buffy coats, and other less frequent specimen types as mentioned earlier.

The SAAC met monthly to review and prioritize sample requests and, if “approved,” the investigator was matched with the biorepository(ies) that could fulfill the request. A process for expedited “administrative approval” was also adopted to streamline simple or urgent requests. A uniform sample request form was developed based on the forms used at each institution and tailored for MassCPR COVID research.

To streamline sample sharing between MassCPR member institutions, we worked with the institutions providing biospecimens to create a MassCPR Material Transfer Agreement (MTA) and Data Use Agreement (DUA) template based on the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM) template.⁹ The aim of the template is to facilitate the process of sharing COVID-19 biospecimens between MassCPR member institutions by standardizing terms. If an investigator requires biospecimens from multiple institutions or biorepositories to meet their research needs, they receive guidance on the required paperwork for each. Note that these templates may not apply to every material/data transfer (particularly if there is a corporate collaboration), but, in our experience, serve to expedite the process in the vast majority of cases.

Specimens were distributed to MassCPR investigators for a variety of studies, ranging from the creation or improvement of diagnostic platforms to the development of antibody-based therapeutics, to studies investigating immunologic responses in SARS-CoV-2 infection.

To reduce duplication of research efforts and conserve the limited COVID-19 biosamples, a set of basic operating principles was adopted:

The SAAC served additional roles as cross-institutional collaborations proceeded at a rapid pace, including:

To facilitate a broader view of COVID biobanking endeavors, a separate, regular meeting was established that included participation by the leaders of the biobanking efforts at each of the clinical sites. This enabled sharing of “best practices” and information about biosamples that were being collected beyond those included in the MassCPR-funded cohorts, including from pediatric or pregnant patients.

The work of the SAAC can be summarized in the following set of statistics (as of January 31, 2023):

Although biosample collections continue for some subjects who were enrolled in the original cohorts, the current MassCPR focus is prioritized on the study of viral variants and PASC. Efforts are led by the PIs of those two areas along with the four PIs of the MassCPR biospecimen program. They lead the charge to continue and coordinate biobanking efforts and to further develop the linking of clinical data and standard assays with the biosamples.

In addition to our work collecting, processing, storing, distributing, and tracking biospecimens across the MassCPR, we are beginning to devote attention and resources to the characterization of many of the collected biospecimens via a set of “standard assays” so that investigators will be able
to ask and answer more detailed questions about SARS-CoV-2 pathogenesis and the clinical management of COVID-19 disease. These standard assays will include measurement of antibody levels, cytokine profiles, and viral load.

Among the challenges that arose during these efforts was the fact that various institutions had different interpretations of the appropriate SARS-CoV-2 biosafety containment level (BSL) for nonrespiratory samples. Some were stricter than others and required viral inactivation before specimens were permitted on their campus. This proved problematic for certain tissues such as peripheral blood mononuclear cells.

Also, early biobanking efforts were almost exclusively from sick inpatients or healthcare workers. It took time to understand that mild disease also needed to be studied as clinicians noted different disease sequelae in patients with milder disease who remained in the community. It was an additional challenge to then resolve how to recruit and obtain samples from outpatients whom we preferred not to come to the hospital.

We further anticipated a need to expand biospecimen sampling beyond standard serum/plasma/DNA biobanking while not knowing initially which samples were going to be relevant for future studies. We opted to start collecting a larger number of specimen types while recognizing the need to continually reassess and narrow the types of samples that our biobanks were storing. As we reassessed biobank resource allocation, some specimen collections were stopped (eg, urine) and others remained but were deprioritized (eg, stool). The convening function of our SAAC proves useful for check-ins on such subjects, including to maintain awareness of and communications with “niche” biobanks that are not part of MassCPR but that support other special consortia, such as those in perinatal and pediatric areas.

Unfortunately, but somewhat fortuitously, the outbreak of monkeypox (mpox) has provided a reaffirming demonstration of the durable utility of the biosample sharing approaches and framework established by the MassCPR. The first U.S. case of mpox was reported on May 18, 2022, at Massachusetts General Hospital,¹⁰ and within 48 hours, biosamples were available for study at both the Ragon Institute and the Boston University NEIDL. This time frame would simply not have been possible in prepandemic times.

In addition to the formation and operation of a rigorous academic enterprise combating the pandemic, we quickly realized that there was a great need to inform the public. Indeed, there was considerable COVID-related misinformation and disinformation being spread, and information supported by credible science was needed. MassCPR faculty members became a consistent source of information for journalists (see: https://masscpr.hms.harvard.edu/news), but MassCPR leadership perceived a different sort of information gap that they hoped to ameliorate.

In response to the public’s need for authoritative, pandemic-related information, MassCPR has sponsored numerous public briefings seeking to demystify testing, vaccines, and coronavirus variants, among many other topics. Our public briefings are open to anyone with a computer and an internet connection. MassCPR convenes two general types of offerings: public briefings and scientific seminars/symposia.

Public briefings are intended for an interested but nonscientific audience. They seek to inform and educate news media, our supporters, and the scientifically curious public about what MassCPR is doing to address the COVID-19 pandemic and future outbreaks and to provide thought leadership on a range of coronavirus-related topics. Our overarching hope is that these sessions inform, educate, and engage the public and news media and help to elevate public understanding of COVID-19-related subjects.

Scientific seminars/symposia are similar to public briefings, although they tend to be more narrowly drawn for the benefit of a primarily (professional) scientific and medical audience. However, like public briefings, the sessions remain open to “all comers,” meaning internal and external audiences, members of the scientific and medical community around the world, the general public, journalists, policy-makers, and additional individuals with a wide variety of motivations and interests. Events are recorded to facilitate access at later times.

These MassCPR events include small panels of speakers drawn from the broader MassCPR community as well as other contributors including those at research institutes located abroad. MassCPR has also welcomed clinical care providers in other areas of the globe to speak, people with deep experience in managing the COVID-19 pandemic in Africa, Asia, Europe, South America, and other regions.

Each speaker is invited to address a key facet of the session’s overall theme. Speakers use a limited number of slides, and each talk is brief, lasting 6 to 8 minutes in total. There is a rigorous 30-minute question-and-answer (Q/A) period at the end of each session in which participants and additional subject matter experts, who are invited to assist with Q/A, field questions live, both on-screen and in the chat or Q/A function depending on the format of the session. For the public briefings in particular, the 30-minute Q/A is often in the form of a “presser” in which members of the science/medical journalism community are given priority access to experts from across MassCPR to assist with the dissemination of scientifically and medically grounded information.

In the third year of the pandemic, regular media briefings were added to these MassCPR offerings. Hosted by one of the faculty co-leads of MassCPR (Bruce Walker, Ragon Institute) and the co-leads of the Viral Variants WG (Jacob Lemieux, MGH, and Jeremy Luban, UMass), media briefings are typically attended by 25 to 30 members of the local, regional, national, and international news media. Each briefing is organized around a specific theme, such as the evolution of the pandemic, COVID in pediatric populations, or the latest in COVID vaccines and therapeutics. Two MassCPR faculty experts in the thematic area are invited to participate. The format of the media briefings includes a “weather report” describing the current state of the pandemic, brief presentations by the expert participants, and extensive Q/A. The repeated attendance by many of the same journalists from prominent media outlets is a testament to the value they place on these sessions.

Prior to each public or media briefing, a “practice session” is convened for each presenter in which they make a “dry run” of their talk, including slides, and receive dedicated feedback from MassCPR leadership, peer presenters, public communications experts, and others regarding their figures/graphics, explanations, use of jargon, and other areas, all intended to make their presentations more accessible and informative to a wider audience. Each of these premeeting sessions has been a veritable master class in presentation organization and tactics.

To date, MassCPR has hosted more than a dozen public briefings and more than a dozen media briefings on topics ranging from COVID diagnostics and how they work, to healthcare disparities in COVID, to vaccines and therapeutics, and more. MassCPR sessions have reached people from 80 different countries (Figure 18.4) as interested individuals have signed on to participate in these virtual talks live. Many thousands of people have tuned-in live to our simultaneously closed-captioned briefings as well as watched them on YouTube. This highlights the truly global nature of COVID-19 and the need for people everywhere to be better informed as they deal with the pandemic and its consequences.

MassCPR public briefings and scientific seminars/symposia have included (in chronological order):

For additional information about MassCPR events or to view previously offered (recorded) sessions, see: https://masscpr.hms.harvard.edu/events.

Additionally, to support a forum that brings together as many patient care providers as possible across the entire cadre of HMS-affiliated teaching hospitals, beginning in April of 2020, MassCPR has been among the organizations invited to support a combined (BIDMC, BWH, and MGH) Harvard Medical Grand Rounds. This series specifically connects the large HMS-affiliated hospital and physician networks of Beth Israel Lahey Health and Mass General Brigham, although any interested physician is able to join regardless of their place of employment. These rounds have run on a weekly to monthly basis to the present day.

In July 2021, MassCPR leadership partnered with the HMS Office of External Education to give additional thought to how best to convey effective, evidence-based medical information to a wider, including international, audience. From these conversations, a group of short clinical educational videos were developed to provide information that would be directly useful to care providers around the globe. Importantly, these videos are freely available—no payment or registration is required to view them. The closed-captioning portion of each video has been translated into languages other than English, including Arabic, French, Hindi, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swahili. Some of the videos have also been translated into Hindi during the spoken portion (see: https://postgraduateeducation.hms.harvard.edu/covid-19-clinical-education-series).

The overarching topics and subtopics of these videos are:

Although many medical schools and academic medical centers tend to organize around similar themes relating to patient care and areas of scientific inquiry that support therapeutic and clinical practice improvements, each of MassCPR’s partnering institutions contributes individual and collective strengths to the consortium. For example, Boston University and the NEIDL bring to the consortium considerable expertise in BSL3/4 and cognate animal biosafety containment-level investigation.¹¹ Additionally, as the largest safety-net hospital in New England, Boston Medical Center has access to patient populations whose participation in research and clinical trials is important to ensuring equitable representation in and access to cutting-edge healthcare advances.

MIT has a wealth of faculty exploring basic science and technology development that advance understanding of human disease and that seek to improve health through scientific and engineering approaches.¹² Tufts University contributes significantly; importantly, its Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine is New England’s only school of veterinary medicine, contributing highly relevant animal models of disease to the development of vaccines (eg, reference¹³). The UMass Chan Medical School has considerable skill in structural biology, immunology, and virology (eg, references^14,15) as well as broad access to patient specimens from locations across the region given its geographical location to the west of the Boston area in Central Massachusetts. These are but a few examples of the wide array of important contributions arising from each of these institutions within MassCPR.

Determining the productivity or “success” of an endeavor like MassCPR is challenging, in part because of the rapidity with which it was established and the fact that it has existed for only three years. The immediate importance and utility of some outcomes was obvious, one example being the work of MassCPR awardee Rebecca M. Baron (BWH) and her colleagues to develop rapidly deployable ventilator splitters to assist with accommodating COVID-19 patient surges.¹⁶

Typical institutional productivity metrics such as numbers of students and post-docs trained, faculty promoted, grant funding received, start-up companies launched, and patents filed for/granted, among other measures, are insufficient criteria for evaluating a novel research consortium like MassCPR. However, one classic metric of academic productivity, papers published, proved to be quite illuminating.

We performed a bibliometric analysis of MassCPR-funded investigators using publicly available publication information contained in PubMed (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) at two different time points—August of 2021 and again in June of 2022. PubMed was queried using the search string “last name (+) initials” (and) “COVID” (or “SARS”) and (home institution keyword, eg, “Harvard” or “NEIDL”). No preprints were included in the analysis in order to eliminate duplicates, as PubMed tends to include both preprints and the ultimately peer-reviewed versions of the same work. Also, although preprints became an important vehicle for disseminating research results across the community in a rapid manner during the pandemic, the data contained therein do not always survive the peer-review process intact. Papers with multiple MassCPR authors were counted only once following a manual review of all search results. Using this approach, we found that, between March of 2020 and August of 2021, MassCPR-funded investigators published 253 papers (via unique PubMed identification numbers or PMIDs). This total increased to 509 papers by June of 2022 (Figure 18.5).

Examples of productivity among the 509 publications (March 2020 through June 2022) are the following numbers of papers appearing in journals with impact factors greater than 20 (N.B., each journal’s impact factor was assessed as of January 2023):