A new study is looking for thousands of Pacific Northwest participants to help uncover answers about how COVID-19 vaccines work in kids and adults over the next few years, two Seattle health care systems announced Thursday morning.
UW School of Medicine and Seattle Children's researchers are teaming up with Portland's Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research on the work, called the CASCADIA study, and are hoping to enroll up to 3,500 children and adults living near Seattle and Portland. At $78 million, the work is one of the larger studies the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is funding, said Dr. Helen Chu, an associate professor of medicine at UW who's co-leading the research.
"The goal is to look at vaccine effectiveness of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine over time," Chu said. "The idea is that we can observe people both before vaccine and after vaccine, and understand what their immune response looks like and how well-protected they are against the variants that arrive and as new things come along."
Investigators are looking for anyone between 6 months old and 49 years old, and are particularly interested in enrolling families to better understand the role of vaccination and prevention in household transmission, Chu said.
"One thing we really want to prioritize is the younger children," she said. "... There are a lot of unanswered questions in that group in terms of how well does the vaccine protect and how long does it last — and questions that have been well-answered in adults that have not been well-answered in children."
A COVID vaccine has not yet been approved in the U.S. for children under 5 years old.
The study will follow participants for up to four years. Throughout the study, they'll take weekly at-home, molecular coronavirus tests — receiving results within 48 hours — and participate in weekly symptom surveys, said Dr. Janet Englund, an infectious disease specialist at Seattle Children's and UW professor of pediatrics who's leading the research at Children's.
Researchers will test for both the coronavirus that causes COVID and, later, other respiratory infections, like the flu or respiratory syncytial virus.
"We all have a lot of interest in influenza because it's been gone for two years, and now what's going to happen?" Englund said. "We at Seattle Children's are quite concerned about next year's [respiratory syncytial virus spread]. It's the No. 1 single cause of hospitalization at Seattle Children's. ... We're really worried about next year."
Researchers will also take annual blood samples to test participants for virus antibodies, which will help show how immune systems respond to vaccination, boosters, infection and reinfection, especially as new coronavirus variants emerge.
UW and Seattle Children's are planning to partner with several school districts in the Puget Sound region to enroll a wide range of young participants — including Seattle Public Schools, Snohomish School District, Highline Public Schools and Shoreline Public Schools.
"The COVID-19 vaccines that have been approved in the U.S. have already shown high levels of safety and effectiveness in both children and adults," Allison Naleway, associate director of science programs at the Center for Health Research, said in a news release. "However, we know that we need to continue studying vaccine effectiveness on an on-going basis."
Anyone interested in participating in the study can find more information at cascadiastudy.org.
