BY-COVID project comes to a close

The BeYond-COVID (BY-COVID) project held its final General Assembly Meeting on September 10th in Brussels, Belgium, followed by an outreach event on September 11th aimed at industrial stakeholders and policymakers. Launched in October 2021 as part of the European Commission’s HERA incubator plan "Anticipating Together the Threat of COVID-19 Variants", BY-COVID will officially conclude at the end of September 2024 after three years of successful multidisciplinary collaboration.

Bringing together 53 partners from 19 countries, BY-COVID united stakeholders across the biomedical field, hospitals, public health, social sciences and humanities. The project was established during the pandemic to provide comprehensive, FAIR data on SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, linking healthcare data with research data. Among its key outputs were tools like the COVID-19 Data Portal, the Pathogens Portal, and the Infectious Diseases Toolkit.

ECRIN contributed to the project by improving the discoverability and reusability of clinical study data objects on infectious diseases through the clinical research MetaData Repository (crMDR). Additionally, ECRIN upgraded the clinical research Data Sharing Repository (crDSR), in partnership with the University of Oslo (UiO), to provide a secure, ethically and legally compliant European platform for clinical research data sharing. The crDSR is currently being piloted through collaboration with the VACCELERATE project. ECRIN also evaluated Data Sharing Statements of COVID-19 clinical studies in clinical trial registries to measure the gap between declared data sharing intentions and actual data sharing, with the results published in BMC Medical Research Methodology.

Explore the BY-COVID brochure for further insights into the project’s outcomes!