 I had planned to take a break in here, but we're actually getting near the end. Are people good for us to just power on for another 15, 20 minutes or so? Okay, great. Yeah. So the next. Thank you. So the next thing on the agenda is council initiated discussion. And before we actually start the discussion for this May meeting, I wanted to come back. And let you know that we did hear the requests that were made at last February's meeting under council initiated discussion. There was a request to receive guidance and best practices. About international collaborations and how to report time and effort commitments. With applications that involve international collaborators. We actually had someone lined up to come present on that, but we decided. And it was more important to try to keep this meeting to a relatively short period of time. And it's also somewhat unfair to the presenter to have to present in this sort of virtual way. So we have not forgotten those requests. We will bring them to the September council meeting. But for today's meeting. For the new council members. This is the point. We're going to turn the microphone over to the council members. We ask if there are reports or presentations. That you would like to hear. In future council meetings about any of our research programs. We also ask you to alert us to. Issues that may be brewing in the field. Problems that you're hearing about in your own institution or from your collaborators. That you think should be, we should be made aware of. So with those very limited. Instructions I welcome comments from the council. Any reports that you want to hear. In the future. We did hear back in February that you would like a report on NIH wide research activities. In the LC research area. And we will plan that for. In the future. Rudy are there. Plans by NHGRI to try to coordinate efforts to. Harness variation as it relates to COVID-19. Predisposition and severity. To understand host. Genetics. And it's the effect of modification on this pandemic. And that's something that I would like to hear from you. You want to comment on that? Kerry's probably poised the best. I mean, the short answer, Hal is we're absolutely at the table in multiple discussions. At multiple levels about many genomic applications. Relevant to the current pandemic. Kerry, are you available to make some comments? I am, but, but I think you've. You basically covered it. Yes. So, so we are, you know, that are yet public, but we're moving quickly on this. You know, and I would also add, Hal, I'm sure you can appreciate, I mean, there's lots of discussions. In some cases there's money identified, in some cases there's money being pursued. And I mean, and also in some cases we are aware of and perhaps we'll be coordinating with major international efforts. So it's certainly not even just limited to U.S. or just NIH spheres. All right, I have Raphael and Sharon in the queue then. Raphael, go ahead. So regarding what you hear among other out there, their concerns about from investigators that have become, it's become very hard for them to work during these times, many of them because of childcare issues. There are any change in guidelines for say, progress reports or anything like that, that are we gonna be taking into account what's going on at least for some, you know, people who have these kinds of situations. We can look into that and get back to you. I know that notices are being published all the time. So I would actually say watch this space for updates in that regard. But if not, it will get back to you in September. This is Eric, I think the other two other points that are related. And number one, it's extremely unlikely there would be NHGRI specific policies that would come out. Almost for certain, there'd be NIH wide policies. And I would echo what Rudy said, very fast moving, lots of, I mean, a lot of discussions, fully we recognize, when I say we, I mean, NIH broadly recognize the many challenges many people are facing. I would think Mike Lauer's blog and regular newsletter and associate a website associate with the Office of External Research would probably be the place to be monitoring because anything that comes out policy wise, NIH wide will come through Mike Lauer specifically. This is Carolyn, I think, I mean, I think I would add on top of that that there already are a number of sort of flexibilities in terms of deadlines and progress reports and those are in the notices. But we're also all open to hearing some of the specific issues that are impacting the community. And we have, we get some of those things and feed them up to Mike Lauer or they come in other places. And so certainly if there's, as you guys net learn as council members, if you reach out to us with some of these examples, I'm not saying we can handle that we're gonna fix example by example, but understanding the types of issues is really valuable to NIH as a whole right now as we address what's sort of not just what are we doing now, but what are we doing three months from now, six months from now, et cetera, as we sort of move through this. And so if there's, individuals can always reach out to their program officer to find out about existing flexibilities, but also to keep us informed of the ongoing types of impact and situations people are having is valuable for us to understand. Okay, Sharon, go ahead. Well, I was gonna make a non COVID comment, but I'll just make a brief one and then say what I was going to say, which is that I do think we also have to be really cognizant of things like travel and travel costs. And I was just trying to book a flight this weekend and it's a morass. So planning for the regular consortium meetings and whatever we put in our grants as reasonable budgets may, even if we're safe to travel, may not bear any sense of what it will actually cost. That was not, I just would add that to the discussion of other major challenges we're gonna face. My comment was actually very different. We had a really interesting discussion at the beginning of council about these two programs that are designed for master's level students, and it would be nice to perhaps have a summary. I mean, in some ways it could be boring, but I think it could be really illuminating of the different NIH educational or training programs and what kinds of trainees they are designed to, or allow to handle. Like we had a brief discussion this morning that T32s have to be someone getting a PhD. Because I think more and more, especially with the disruptions of COVID-19, students are gonna be in all kinds of training programs and understanding better what the current NIH structures look like and which ones might be most appropriate to use to different levels of trainees. I think it would be helpful, particularly given the training working groups, recommendation to significantly increase in the NHGRI's training footprint to try to think as creatively as we can among the existing NIH opportunity. Okay, Steven Rich. Yeah, I have actually three comments. I'll start with the COVID one first. And basically the conversations that I've been having amongst investigators as well as people in different institutes is that it seems like individual institutes developing their own sort of pathway to decide how to handle no-cost extensions, both for grants that end in this fiscal year. And as well as what happens to the impact of being unlocked down for months at a time and how that affects the progress in the research. And even if you have a couple of years left on your grant, if you spent six months or two a year not being able to do something as well as you could, how does that work? And it seems like there is a need to come up with a standardized NIH policy for a lot of this. And yet each institute seems to be trying to figure it out on their own. So hopefully there'll be something that comes out of the overall NIH effort to give some guidance about. The second part of my three part of my trio is actually, I've been part of the Genomes Pushing Program through a small project, but I think it would be useful just to have a overall discussion or a presentation about what are the findings from this project program because it is multi-layered, it's different components and different disease domains, an analytic component. And it's a lot of moving parts in some ways and I think would be very helpful to the council knowing just for the amount of funds expended on the genome sequencing program to get a flavor for what actually has come out of it. So that's one of the areas I would appreciate hearing and perhaps others as well. And the final- Wait, Steve, you're talking about our genome sequencing program? Yes. So first of all, of course, it's not over yet. So did you really mean to have an update before it's all of its findings? It would be nice to know what's happened. And are you interested? I mean, it also goes back 20 years, so more than that. I mean, what time- The last five years. So you just want to know the most recent iteration and do you mean all the components or do you mean just the centers for common disease genomics? I think it'd be good to have all of it because the Mendelian component, I think, has been extraordinarily successful, but I'm not exactly certain what has happened so much. So you mean the most recent iteration of the genome sequencing program? Right. Right. The third part goes back to this discussion on masters in genomics and data science. We have a school of data science here with Phil Bourne as the dean. It's been relatively recent, but there's been an explosion of students coming in and getting a masters. And we have these seed dating operations where we try to get these students into our labs. Meanwhile, Bank of America and all these other places are trying to get them to come and do rotations with them. And it's almost impossible to get these students into genome science, much less biology. And in part, it could be the fact they can take a master's and start making $140,000 a year in a bank or some other area. And or it could be that there's just not the background. So I think it'd be useful to think about how we can target students even before they get to the master's level almost. It's like at the undergrad area to try to get those people who are in this computer science, analytic frame set to frame of mind to get into genome sciences so that when they get into the master's program, they see genome sciences as a potential way of going forward. In our own, our classes on advances in public health genomics over the last five years, we've had one person who of 10 or 15 data sciences coming into our course who had a background in biology and she immediately got a job at NIH working in a lab at NIA with her interest and also her training. So these are entirely top notch people employable but we need to get them earlier, I think. I have no solution. That's just a question. How do you envision a council discussion addressing this, Steve? What do you want us to do here? Come up with a good idea. Okay. Okay. Terry, did you wanna make a comment? Yeah, I was just gonna speak to Steve's first point about NIH wide guidance on COVID, which there is some we ought to be a little careful in what we wish for because there are different needs across different institutes. Our programs are, some of them are very, very different from many of the other institutes. Of course, every institute thinks it's different but also I think we're trying our best to be as flexible as possible within the constraints of the budgets we have. So when you see NIH wide guidance that's problematic for you, it'd be helpful specifically in genomic research to be helpful to know that. In addition, if you see areas where you're really seeing a lot of conflict, if you can let us know, there may be good reasons for that or there may not be any reason for it. Yeah, and a lot of this, of course, is unpredictable. It is. Of course, we don't know what's going to happen in the fall with COVID and especially if you have people who are doing mass work and they have to spend months bringing back the mice, only to have to shut them down again in case COVID comes back. There's a whole series of, if then, else's that occurs. So a lot is not known ahead of times. It makes it difficult. Jeff Botkin. Yeah, another COVID question and sort of NIH policy issue that I haven't actually thought through. And so many projects now have been suspended in terms of participant recruitment. So what does opening up look like with respect to clinical trials and who makes those sorts of decisions? I'm going to guess the NIH doesn't, not in a position to say uniformly, but may well be things like CSER consortium that want to have some coordinated statement about when is it timely? And is that an institution level decision purely at the IRB? Is that something that should be collaborated with NIH? So it's a sort of general question about what sort of standards should we be looking at for beginning participant recruitment in areas that might be appropriate for that? So this is Terry, I can start, but I'd ask those who are buried in COVID policies to speak up. I think Lucia and Jen have had some role in that and Carolyn, what we've tried to do actually is to encourage investigators to follow the guides of their institutions because this is such a local problem and it varies from locality to locality. When we have consortia, we again have tried to coordinate across the consortia in decision-making as to whether to stop something across the consortium or at individual sites. And I think, because these are cooperative bremuss and these are joint decision-making models, we would continue to do it that way. But I think looking to the NIH to tell you start recruitment is probably not likely to happen. Carolyn, would you agree? Yeah, I mean, I think as always, there's gonna be a lot of differing to the local institution. And of course, if you look at a national situation, we also recognize that different localities are gonna be in different positions. But at the same time, it does become valuable to think about that in the terms of consortia. And that's part of what Terri was talking about in terms of some of the unique NHGRI types of challenges that we're gonna potentially be facing as we work through all of this. So it's a good point, Jeff, but right now, and this is sort of the advice we gave to the consortia is we're trying to continue as best we can, but we need to be in recognition of current local... Issues. And this is Lucy, I don't have much to add in terms of our guidance to applicants, but for example, CSER investigators, many of whom are working at home, are meeting on a pretty much regular schedule, working groups, steering committees and such, and really trying to keep tabs on where the different sites are at in terms of their own progress as well as what they can continue to do to contribute to the consortia wide paper. So I think it's more monitoring at this point. We could certainly provide an update later if that would be of interest. Good, thank you. Okay, I have Steven Rich and then Sharon Plon. Yeah, just to comment, we are guided by our vice president for a search office in concert with the IRB. And basically they've told us that we cannot get into clinics until they say so. And that time has not arrived yet. I think that depends upon the individual institution and issues related to risk to the participants as well as risk to the individuals who go into the clinics for recruitment and how they will try to establish the masking and the six feet boundaries and things like that. At our institution for the clinics, we were interested in they basically have set it up so that everyone coming to the clinic sits in the car outside in the parking lot until they're called and then they're escorted to the clinic. So it's very difficult to know how best to do this. And you have to also consider that a coordinating center is also under other types of stress to try to keep up with that once things open up. So for us, it's the IRB and the vice president for research. Okay, Sharon? Yeah, I was actually gonna say something very similar to Steven. Actually, this is actually one situation where NIH has almost no say. It really is our local hospitals. And I would say NHGRI has a bit of a disadvantage here because what the hospitals are mainly prioritizing our treatment trials. And so for example, our study where we are providing results, we are allowed to still recruit only in the circumstance where those results were felt by the oncologists to be helpful to the patient's overall treatment plan. But in general, most hospitals are gonna prioritize restarting entry into treatment trials and interventional trials prior to what they might do for a genomic space trial. Any last thoughts before I close the council initiated discussion? Okay.