COVID-19 Data Portal and Clinical Trials Data Repository
Data sharing and digital tools are critical for the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. EOSC-Life partners and solutions were well positioned to respond quickly to the needs of our community. We grew our project by 2 new work packages and our COVID-related activities include the following:
International COVID-19 biohackathon and cloud resources
Frontloading of open tools and workflows (WorkflowHub, etc.)
Building a repository to host COVID-19 clinical trial data (through our new Work Package 14)
COVID-19 Data Portal
The EU COVID-19 Data Platform is a political priority captured in the ERAvsCORONA action plan, stressing from the start that the Platform is a use-case of EOSC, and fully embedded in the EOSC ecosystem.
Within this European initiative involving EOSC-Life beneficiary EMBL-EBI, EOSC-Life Work Package 13 is tasked with extending the COVID-19 Data Portal. The following diagram shows how the 13 Life Science Research Infrastructures involved in EOSC-Life will interact with EMBL-EBI, national infrastructures and international initiatives to fuel this effort.
The objectives are threefold:
To mobilise open biomolecular data
To mobilise new SARS-CoV-2 data
To connect to clinical and epidemiological data
Mobilising open biomolecular data
Mark-up and indexing infrastructure put in place across ELIXIR Core Data Resources of relevance
500,000 records from the biomolecular and literature domains available openly to users
Infrastructure for “related resources” in place currently spanning some 59 resources
Among the resources available from the EOSC-Life participants are:
Mobilising new SARS-CoV-2 data
Country-by-country campaign to assist data generators
Support for data management, standards compliance and submission via tools, Help desk, calls, etc.
>160,000 viral isolates with raw sequence data
75% of the world’s data flows through the Data Hubs
Connecting to clinical and epidemiological data
Establishment of a National Coordinators’ group
4 full meetings; 9 bilaterals
Engagement around: viral data management; viral data brokering; management of sensitive host data; cohort data integration; clinical and epidemiological context; National COVID-19 Data Portals
COVID-19 Clinical Trials Data Repository
During a pandemic there is a need for timely and accurate collection, reporting and sharing of Individual Participant Data (IPD) from clinical trials. IPD should be stored in trustworthy data repositories that have been certified, are subject to rigorous governance, committed to longer-term preservation of their data and compliant with the relevant regulations (e.g. GDPR). This will facilitate re-analyses, secondary analyses and patient-level data meta-analyses. With the help of EOSC-Life, ECRIN and Uio are currently developing such a repository using the TSD platform for sensitive data. The repository will be part of the European COVID-19 Data Portal.
Governance
Relevant stakeholders are involved in the concept and strategy, and a plan for governance and sustainability is underway. The following groups have been formed:
Steering Group: comprises the WT-leaders of EOSC-Life WP14 from ECRIN and UiO, the coordinator of EOSC-Life, a legal expert
