Global.health, Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) and ISARIC are excited to announce a new partnership for rapid ingestion, processing, standardisation, and secure sharing of global clinical data.
In the next five years, the collaborative will expand their partnership around three main aims:
- Co-develop scalable clinical data pipelines for the harmonization of data across clinical research sites.
- Develop community resources and analytical tools for the rapid analysis of clinical data to estimate clinical severity, risk factors, and effectiveness of treatments.
- Expand the integration of clinical data with genomic and epidemiological data that facilitate understanding of factors driving outbreak severity and burden.
Global.health, an open access epidemiological data repository and visualisation platform, will provide vital software engineering support and leverage their experience and understanding of multi-modal data integration. Fiocruz and PUC-Rio will apply their expertise in data processing to support research sites to develop reusable analytic pipelines that address local health priorities. ISARIC’s global network of researchers will contribute vast, contextual experience in clinical epidemiology to design the data collection and analysis needed to rapidly characterise emerging infections to inform treatment and outbreak response.
By combining the expertise across these partners, this collaboration will integrate public health epidemiological data and clinical data to improve health research and outcomes on a global scale. The project will also engage the public by providing access to sites related to these tools, fostering transparency and broader participation, and support the strengthening of analytics at these sites by integrating these tools, ensuring that the data-driven insights are robust and effectively utilised.
The currently available tools can be found here: https://github.com/ISARICResearch
About the Partners
ISARIC is a global, grass-roots consortium of over 60 clinical research networks in 140 countries, working together on epidemic infections such as COVID-19, pandemic influenza, Nipah virus, dengue, Ebola, Lassa fever and plague. ISARIC supports clinical researchers to generate the evidence needed to improve the care of patients and reduce illness and deaths. The ISARIC Global Support Centre is hosted by the Pandemic Sciences Institute (PSI) at the University of Oxford.
Global.health is an international data science initiative focussed on building tools for the rapid ingestion of trusted public health data during the first 100 days of emerging infectious disease outbreaks. Global.health open-source data science tools scale to billions of data points and can be deployed locally and internationally for enhanced global collaboration to tackle threats from infectious diseases.
The Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) is the leading public health and infectious disease institute in Latin America. Fiocruz, connected to the Brazilian Ministry of Health, aims to carry out activities focused on strengthening the Unified Health System (SUS) in the areas of health, education, and scientific and technological development. Fiocruz operates multiple research centers and institutes across Brazil, focusing on infectious diseases, vaccine development, biotechnology, and health education. Fiocruz fosters collaborations both nationally and internationally, playing a pivotal role in addressing global health challenges and enhancing healthcare systems in underserved regions.
The Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) is a philanthropic and nonprofit higher education institution regulated by the Secretariat of Regulation and Supervision of Higher Education. Today, it is recognised as one of the best and most prestigious universities in Latin America, according to Times Higher Education. Researchers from the Center for Healthcare Operations and Intelligence (NOIS), a research laboratory from PUC-Rio, have assembled a team of experts in health, data science, engineering, and community engagement, conducting work with social responsibility and impact with experience in developing tools to analyse and improve health outcomes. The lab is a collaboration between the Department of Industrial Engineering at PUC-Rio and Fiocruz, which aims to scale and optimize healthcare resources, using data science techniques, thus providing evidence for data-driven decision making.
If you’re interested in learning more about this consortium please get in touch with Laura Merson (clinical research) or Moritz Kraemer and Abhishek Dasgupta (epidemiological, genomic, software development).
