With the goal of advancing the fight against COVID-19, the Partners of Citadel and Citadel Securities have made a $2 million gift to Weill Cornell Medicine to develop new approaches to protect people from the disease and identify new cases of it.
The gift from Citadel—led by longtime Weill Cornell Medicine benefactor Kenneth C. Griffin—will support two initiatives: a future national, randomized clinical trial evaluating whether an anti-malaria medication can protect front-line healthcare workers from COVID-19, and the accelerated development and national rollout of a rapid-response test for the infection.
Griffin is the founder and CEO of Citadel, one of the world’s leading alternative investment managers, and the founder of Citadel Securities, a leading global market maker. His many generous contributions to Weill Cornell Medicine span more than two decades and include nearly $10 million in support of numerous institutional initiatives.
“As the number of COVID-19 cases continues to surge, we must battle the virus on multiple fronts so that we can slow the spread of infection, reduce its burden on our healthcare system, and save lives,’’ said Dr. Augustine M.K. Choi, the Stephen and Suzanne Weiss Dean of Weill Cornell Medicine. “This generous gift from Ken Griffin and the partners of Citadel and Citadel Securities will advance our efforts to achieve these goals.”
Dr, Rainu Kaushal
“Clinical research has never been more important to advance the healthcare and public health response to COVID-19,” said Dr. Rainu Kaushal, senior associate dean of clinical research and chair of population health sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine and physician-in-chief of population health sciences at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center.
“We are grateful for these gifts from Citadel that will allow us to advance COVID-19 testing and better protect our front-line healthcare workers.”
“The fortitude and compassion of our frontline responders is heroic. Doctors, nurses and countless others continue to relentlessly battle the virus and selflessly care for the sick, while our nation’s researchers pursue the science needed to ultimately lead us out of this pandemic,” Griffin said. “Collaboration and philanthropic support are essential to accelerate medical solutions and will be the difference in protecting as many lives as possible."
Healthcare professionals are at higher risk for COVID-19 infection than the general population. Initial international data suggests that approximately 20 percent of these workers become infected as a result of their efforts to care for sick patients, with rates higher in areas where there is a limited supply of protective equipment, such as masks and gowns. While healthcare workers continue to use this equipment—considered the best line of defense— at all times, there is currently no existing therapy that can prevent healthcare workers from acquiring the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 – or from asymptomatically spreading it to others, including their own families.
Clinical Trial to Test Anti-Malaria Medications’ Protective Qualities
Dr. Timothy Wilkin
The national clinical trial, expected to launch in the coming weeks, will evaluate whether hydroxychloroquine –an anti-malaria drug that has been identified as potentially effective against COVID-19 – can protect front-line healthcare workers from contracting the virus. Investigators plan to enroll into the trial 15,000 healthcare workers, including 1,500 from New York City, from intensive care units, emergency departments and COVID-19 wards nationwide over a two-week period, with the randomized clinical trial lasting a month. The gift will support increased New York City enrollment of healthcare workers into this study.
The study is funded nationally by the non-profit healthcare organization PCORI and will be implemented through the PCORnet Network. INSIGHT, run by Dr. Kaushal, is a unique partnership of more than five highly ranked academic medical centers in the New York City and will be the work’s regional hub. INSIGHT trial sites will be led by Dr. Timothy Wilkin, an associate professor of medicine and infectious disease specialist at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center.
“This trial represents a critical step forward in protecting this vulnerable population while we work on the front lines fighting COVID-19,’’ Dr. Wilkin said. “We are extraordinarily grateful for Citadel’s generosity and their contribution to this valiant effort to stop this global pandemic.”
Rapid Test to Detect COVID-19
Dr. Christopher Mason
The rapid-response test for COVID-19, developed by Dr. Christopher Mason, an associate professor of physiology and biophysics and co-director of the WorldQuant Initiative for Quantitative Prediction at Weill Cornell Medicine, leverages loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) technology – a rapid gene-identification technique – and indicates a positive result with a color change. The test, which also received funding support from WorldQuant, the quantitative investment firm founded by Igor Tulchinsky, can complement current diagnostic methods and use samples derived from mouth swabs, instead of nasal swabs. It also does not necessitate the use of equipment or supplies that are both currently in short supply, while able to rapidly expand in scale and could potentially be used to test as many as 100,000 people per day. It will soon be submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for emergency-use approval.
This work is in collaboration with companies and institutions including Color, Cornell's Ithaca campus, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Illumina, the New York Genome Center, HudsonAlpha and Tempus.
“This rapid-response test will allow us to quickly and easily diagnose those who are infected with COVID-19 and control their exposure to others, ultimately stemming the spread of the virus,’’ said Dr. Mason, who is also an associate professor of computational genomics in computational biomedicine in the HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud Institute for Computational Biomedicine, and the WorldQuant Foundation Research Scholar at Weill Cornell Medicine. “Thanks to Citadel’s visionary gift, we will have a critically needed, distinct tool in our arsenal to fight this insidious disease.”