A National Approach to Prioritizing Emerging Issues in COVID-19 in Transplantation

Transplant recipients remain at higher risk of severe COVID-19 outcomes. For transplant recipients surviving COVID-19 and/or experiencing the extreme stress associated with the pandemic, little is known about effective strategies to support recovery of quality of life. Studying these questions in Canada is challenging, given the pace of variant evolution and drug development, as well as regional variations in therapeutic practices and public health policies. How quickly the pandemic changes has made it difficult to deliver research results in time to still be relevant for clinical and policy decision making.

To address this challenge, CDTRP has established a national, multi-disciplinary team and an agile, collaborative framework to address emerging research questions. With 12 participating Canadian transplant programs, we are creating a prospective registry of over 2500 transplant patients and their caregivers. A national data platform will capture outcomes from medical chart reviews, Patient-Reported Outcome Measures, and economic questionnaires to enable our research team to answer emerging questions on (1) therapeutic effectiveness and safety; (2) mental health, long-term well-being, and family impact; and (3) therapeutic cost-effectiveness and economic burden on the health care system and on families.

This workshop is open to everyone in the national transplant community, including patients and family, health professionals, partner organizations, industry, and researchers from all disciplines. We will continue to work together as the project progresses by sharing results as they are produced and adjusting priorities based on what we find, changes in our health landscape and emerging transplant patient and family needs. As a result we will continue to fill the most pressing knowledge gaps related to therapeutics, mental health and well-being, and the economics of COVID-19.

Session Objectives:

• Share progress we’ve made over the past year on the TREAT-COVID research project
• Identify ways our community partners would like to:
• Receive research results to stay engaged as the project moves forward; and
• Provide feedback so we can adjust research priorities on an ongoing basis
• Gain every participant’s perspective, including adult and pediatric transplant recipients, their families, caregivers, researchers & clinicians
• Continue to align the research priorities with the priorities of the transplant community and the changing healthcare landscape

This session is supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).