As a Center of Excellence for the Gift from a Child rapid autopsy donation program, the collaborative team at Weill Cornell Medicine and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center found unique ways to deliver on parents’ wishes to donate tumor tissue in the confines of the pandemic.

Obtaining postmortem tissue from pediatric oncology patients is critical to research and may help grieving families heal. Since 2019, the national Gift from a Child program has made significant progress in collecting postmortem tissue from pediatric patients with central nervous system tumors to advance research. This progress was at risk during the onset of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 pandemic, when some autopsy programs came to a halt.

In this paper we retrospectively reviewed autopsies of four patients treated at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center who underwent postmortem examination at Weill Cornell Medicine from June 2020 to March 2021.