Q&A from January 13, 2026 R3 Seminar

Ms. Thorn: The process for requesting biospecimens from the adult and pediatric cohorts begins with submitting your project proposal through an application process overseen by the Administrative Coordinating Center. Once your proposal is approved, the Data Resource Center (DRC) will work with you to see how RECOVER samples can best align with your study’s aims. This will involve an iterative phenotyping process where we will work together to define symptom profiles of interest, followed by a coding stage in which the DRC will identify participants and samples that fit within agreed-upon inclusion criteria. After these collaborative steps, the result will be a finalized pick list of samples that will be used to help answer your study’s questions. After final sign-off from the principal investigator of the study, the DRC will run the pick list through a series of checks that involve the Biospecimen Access Committee (BAC)—whose purpose is to ensure samples are being distributed appropriately—to preserve samples in a fashion that optimizes sample utilization. Once the pick list is essentially approved, the PASC Biorepository Core (PBC) will then receive the list and begin pulling the selected samples and preparing them for distribution. Although this question is about the adult and pediatric cohorts, we also want to note that the general process is similar for requesting the autopsy cohort’s samples as well. 

Ms. Thorn: This is a very important question, and we understand everybody has study timelines. I will say that defining the pick list can take up to 12 to 16 weeks. Defining the pick list includes defining symptom profiles and selecting samples. This is a very highly iterative process between your team and the DRC. So, this depends on the complexity of studies and response times. Once the pick list is defined, then the process of the BAC approvals and PBC fulfillment and shipment of samples takes around 10 to 12 weeks. Overall, you’re expecting, I would say, 20 to 30 weeks, but that’s a very high-level view of the average amount of time that you could expect—and again, the timeline is dependent on response times and study complexity.

Dr. Stone: After all that is done, a key issue is that your institution will have to execute a material transfer agreement (MTA) of some type. That can happen very quickly at some institutions, or it might take months at other institutions. So, you need to also understand how long it will take your institution to execute that MTA.

Ms. Hughes: If you have a research question in mind and aren’t exactly sure what data are available or how many participants might be available for your analysis, I encourage you to go over to BDC Powered by PIC. Using that publicly available tool, you can search for terms that you’re interested in, and I encourage folks to try a couple of different search terms. For example, during the last seminar, someone asked about olfaction tests. Searching for smell, or nasal, or nose, or other related or similar terms could help them to find some of the variables or the specific data points that they are looking for. 

Dr. Fisher: As you are working on preparing your application materials for your grants or your biospecimens, we have cloud-use statement language available on the BDC website. We also provide support for estimating cloud costs. Estimating cloud costs is really hard the first time you do it, but it’s not the first time we’ve done it. We have assistance in doing that, and we’re having a minimizing cloud cost presentation on January 29. Working in cloud computing is, as I said, kind of downstream, but none of us have any desire for you to spend more of your research dollars on cloud costs than is necessary. So please let us help you with planning that.

Dr. Stone: Our goal is to try to make that happen as much as possible. Every time someone does an assessment on a particular biosample, we would love for that to become eventually integrated into the database for multiple reasons. For one, so you don’t waste your time repeating it and your money, but also so we can synergize and maximize the impact and compare it with all the other studies being done on biosamples, possibly on the same patient. It’s a little difficult with some of the ancillary studies because you’re not necessarily obligated to give patient-level data back to RECOVER. We haven’t made that an obligation, but we are encouraging that. I will say it looks good in your application if you say you will do that and you’re open to that, but it is not currently a requirement.

Ms. Thorn: For the adult and pediatric cohorts, it’s a little different, where we have a wider database, so one caveat with sharing data is studies may produce data on only a small subset of the full database. There are a lot of nuances with sharing data. However, we do have a workflow we’re trying to work on where investigators can share samples, kind of like what Dr. Stone was promoting, where it would be great if we could share data with each other, and we want to keep this as collaborative as possible. Variables will not be made public and will not be added to the dataset. However, through BDC, we have a workflow ready if people want to share with other investigators within that platform and see the assay results of various studies for participants who may overlap between study groups. 

Ms. Thorn: When investigators submit their application, there are different review committees that will be going over details such as sample size and power, so there is not necessarily a set standard. We don’t require a threshold for sample size or power. That’s really application dependent. I’ve noticed that when people are able to justify the sample size and explain their study, there have not been limitations regarding someone’s specific sample size. We’ve had sample sizes from 3 to 1,000, so if there’s justification and if you’re able to explain how your power analysis will work with any given request, then I think that’ll be OK. I’m not part of the review process, but there are review committees who go over the scientific merit and the statistical significance of the requested amount of samples.

Ms. Thorn: No. Decedents in the autopsy cohort are distinct from participants in all other RECOVER cohorts.

Dr. Stone: Due to costs, we could not collect tissue from all sites in the body, and tissue site prioritization was determined by the committee setting up the protocol.

Dr. Stone: Yes. The enrolling sites document it. We are working to eventually make it available to outside research groups in BDC. 

Dr. Stone: We hope to keep the biobank open as long as possible. How long the biobank will be open will depend on National Institutes of Health funding.

Ms. Thorn: PAXgene RNA will be distributed with the RNA already isolated. Some samples are currently stored post-RNA isolation, but others will require a couple extra steps from the PBC to isolate the RNA before distribution for studies.

Ms. Thorn: As of right now, no residual tissue is available from colonoscopy biopsies to be distributed.

Ms. Hughes: If you identify another dataset in BDC to which you’d like to request access, you will need to go through the Data Access Request process via the database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP). For more information about this process, see documentation on BDC.

Once you are authorized via dbGaP to access the data, you will be able to access the participant-level data on BDC platforms.

Ms. Thorn: We do not send samples to Europe at this time, so the analysis should be done in the United States only.