BY-COVID is a €12 million Horizon Europe project, coordinated by ELIXIR, that strives to 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 are accessible to all those who need it across research, healthcare, and industry.
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 ELIXIR and EMBL-EBI. The COVID-19 Data Platform sort to assemble the existing elements of informatics infrastructure from core EMBL-EBI infrastructure and pathogen-focused tools built under the COMPARE project; as well as extend and enhance these elements and their operationalisation in both the COVID-19 Data Portal and SARS-CoV-2 Data Hubs.
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.
This interdisciplinary project involves 53 project partners from across 19 countries within Europe and draws together experts from the life sciences, policy and social science ensuring that the project is driven by a diverse range of science. Find out more in the news release on the BY-COVID website.
ELIXIR Belgium is involved in and contributing to WP4: Connecting the COVID-19 platform to analysis tools and local portals. Specifically, WP4 will develop, aggregate and integrate tools for analysis and visualisation of data in the COVID-19 Data Platform. It will provide a provenance framework for tracking of derived data and the transparency and trustworthiness of results which will ultimately improve trust in science. Researchers will be enabled to exploit the large volumes of data for tasks such as identification of variants of concern.
Other work packages are: