The National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C) is a public–private–government partnership established during the Coronavirus pandemic to create a centralized data resource called the “N3C data enclave.” This resource contains individual-level health data from participating healthcare sites nationwide to support rapid collaborative analytics. N3C has enabled analytics within a cloud-based enclave of data from electronic health records from over 17 million people (with and without COVID-19) in the USA. To achieve this goal of a shared data resource, N3C implemented a shared governance strategy involving stakeholders in decision-making. The approach leveraged best practices in data stewardship and team science to rapidly enable COVID-19-related research at scale while respecting the privacy of data subjects and participating institutions. N3C balanced equitable access to data, team-based scientific productivity, and individual professional recognition – a key incentive for academic researchers. This governance approach makes N3C research sustainable and effective beyond the initial days of the pandemic. N3C demonstrated that shared governance can overcome traditional barriers to data sharing without compromising data security and trust. The governance innovations described herein are a helpful framework for other privacy-preserving data infrastructure programs and provide a working model for effective team science beyond COVID-19.

Biospecimen repositories play a vital role in enabling investigation of biologic mechanisms, identification of disease-related biomarkers, advances in diagnostic assays, recognition of microbial evolution, and characterization of new therapeutic targets for intervention. They rely on the complex integration of scientific need, regulatory oversight, quality control in collection, processing and tracking, and linkage to robust phenotype information. The COVID-19 pandemic amplified many of these considerations and illuminated new challenges, all while academic health centers were trying to adapt to unprecedented clinical demands and heightened research constraints not witnessed in over 100 years. The outbreak demanded rapid understanding of SARS-CoV-2 to develop diagnostics and therapeutics, prompting the immediate need for access to high quality, well-characterized COVID-19-associated biospecimens. We surveyed 60 Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) hubs to better understand the strategies and barriers encountered in biobanking before and in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Feedback revealed a major shift in biorepository model, specimen-acquisition and consent process from a combination of investigator-initiated and institutional protocols to an enterprise-serving strategy. CTSA hubs were well equipped to leverage established capacities and expertise to quickly respond to the scientific needs of this crisis through support of institutional approaches in biorepository management.