13-Oct-2021
Today marks the launch of a new €12 million Horizon Europe funded project, BeYond-COVID (BY-COVID), which will tackle the data challenges that can hinder effective pandemic response. The core aim of the project is to ensure that data on SARS-CoV-2 and other infectious diseases can be found and used by everyone.
Instruct-ERIC is playing a key role in the BY-COVID project, with a number of Instruct partners involved in the FAIRification and interoperability of COVID-related data:
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect many lives globally, and it is crucial for us to reflect back on how the scientific community initially responded to the crisis, and what technical gaps there were that hindered the ability of scientists to investigate SARS-CoV-2 at the early stages of the pandemic. There has been a strong response across the world, with many nations generating and sharing vast amounts of data and locally tracking variants. Learning from this past experience, and also by monitoring the present day developments of the COVID-19 pandemic we can develop resources, data standards and guidelines that will enable rapid application to novel emerging threats, and specifically unite and coordinate dispersed datasets from different institutes and countries.
Niklas Blomberg, BY-COVID Coordinator and Director of ELIXIR, spoke of the need to work across scientific communities in pandemic preparedness: “It is fundamental that we learn and build on the experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic, to ensure that, from a data perspective, there are no hindrances to rapid access to infectious disease data. The BY-COVID project is a fantastic opportunity to build on the existing infrastructure of the COVID-19 Data Platform, providing opportunities for new knowledge to be generated by integrating data from new disciplines to create a strong foundation for future effective pandemic response”
BY-COVID will build and expand upon the successful COVID-19 Data Platform, a resource initiated in the early stages of the pandemic and led by EMBL-EBI. Since its launch, many countries have established their own national data hubs, which ensures that data produced locally can be instantaneously connected and shared with the main COVID-19 Data Portal. Rather than focus purely on providing technical solutions to the biological data, BY-COVID will work with partners such as the Versatile emerging infectious disease Observatory (VEO) and the Public Health Information Research Infrastructure (PHIRI) to incorporate data from a broader range of disciplines, including public health and social sciences.
The BY-COVID project strives to simplify data access and reuse through three main steps:
