Members of the Sinai Immunology Review Project. From left to right: Matthew Spindler; Louise Malle; Berengere Salome, PharmD, PhD ; Miriam Merad, MD, PhD ; Luisanna Paulino; Verena van der Heide, PhD; and Nicolas Vabret, PhD. Via Zoom, left to right, top row to bottom: Alvaro Moreira, MD; Robert Samstein, MD, PhD; Rachel Levantovsky; Matthew Park, Conor Gruber; and Emma Risson.
The unprecedented generation of non-peer-reviewed scientific information about COVID-19 in just a few months helped galvanize more than 50 members of the Precision Immunology Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai into forming a group to parse through the data.
The effort, called the Sinai Immunology Review Project, is composed of faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students. By sharing their knowledge and expertise, project members evaluate the quality of the research being posted to the bioRxiv and medRxiv preprint servers and help advance the most significant findings that are related to their field. Peer review is quality control provided by a panel of experts who evaluate whether a study has used proper research methods and is scientifically valid.
“Reviewing the preprinted studies benefits the authors and the scientific community, provides the public with access to what is being discussed, and helps reinforce scientific credibility,” says one of the project leaders, Nicolas Vabret, PhD, Assistant Professor of Medicine (Hematology and Medical Oncology) and a member of the Precision Immunology Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine. “To help pick the best treatments for COVID-19 you need to have a strong understanding of the pathology of the disease and we are able to help with this.” Many of the researchers who are working from home during this pandemic welcome the collaborative opportunity to contribute to the field.
Since mid-March, the project’s participants have ranked more than 2,000 studies according to their immunological relevance and written 130 reviews that are then posted alongside the corresponding study on the preprint servers. To ensure that the best science is elevated, each summary is written by a fellow or student specializing in a specific area of the immune system and then reviewed by a faculty member. A website built by Nicolas Fernandez, PhD, a computational scientist at Mount Sinai’s Human Immune Monitoring Center, hosts all of the reviews.
Recognition of this work recently led the editors of Nature Reviews Immunology to reach out to Miriam Merad, MD, PhD, Mount Sinai Professor of Immunology and Director of the Precision Immunology Institute, to form a unique collaboration. Mount Sinai is now publishing three short commentaries in the publication each week on the most promising immunological findings on COVID-19. Within a few days of launching the collaboration with Nature Reviews Immunology, Mount Sinai’s work was viewed more than 10,000 times.
Project co-leader Robert Samstein, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology, and a member of the Precision Immunology Institute, says, “This has been a massive effort. It’s been a great opportunity for Mount Sinai’s trainees to integrate all of their knowledge and provide a summary for the scientific community,” so quickly and efficiently. “The huge flurry of output on COVID-19 by the scientific community is unprecedented and this effort is responding to that.”
While speed and the open sharing of information are vital to enhancing further understanding of the COVID-19 health emergency, the peer-review process is an essential part of scientific advancement and the preprint servers that are now publishing all of this new information were never meant as a replacement. In the absence of the peer-review process, members of the Immunology Project are stepping in to provide their expertise in the best way they can, says Dr. Samstein.
“By doing this we can really help make it easier for policy makers, physicians, and scientists to see what the best information is as it evolves and have a direct impact on treatments,” adds Dr. Vabret.
As time goes on, the medical and scientific community is learning more about the disease and calling into question some of its earliest hypotheses about possible treatments. This makes the need to highlight quality science to inform decision-making a continued priority, according to Dr. Vabret.