BY-COVID

Funding programme: Horizon 2020 (N 101046203)

Budget: €12M

Coordinator: ELIXIR / EMBL-EBI

Duration: 3 years (October 2021 - September 2024)

BeYond-COVID (BY-COVID) aims to provide comprehensive open data on SARS-CoV-2 and other infectious diseases across scientific, medical, public health and policy domains. It will strongly emphasise mobilising raw viral sequences, helping to identify and monitor the spread of SARS-CoV-2 variants. The project will further accelerate access to SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 and linking patient and research data.

To ensure interoperability of national and global efforts, BY-COVID will enable federated data analysis compliant with data protection regulations, harmonise and manage metadata and sample identifiers, and facilitate long-term cataloguing.

BY-COVID will build on the One-Health approach, exploit and contribute to the European Open Science Cloud and work closely with the ISIDORe project funded through HORIZON Europe.

The project will integrate established national and European infrastructures with ELIXIR, BBMRI, ECRIN, PHIRI and CESSDA. It will build on existing efforts, such as the COVID-19 Data Platform and the Versatile Emerging infectious disease Observatory project (VEO), maximising efficiency. It will also develop synergies with the European Health Data Space.

In an unprecedented and unique interdisciplinary effort, BY-COVID will bring together 53 partners from 19 countries and stakeholders from the biomedical field, hospitals, public health, social sciences and humanities.

Ultimately, it will improve European readiness for future pandemics, enhance genomic surveillance and rapid-response capabilities. In addition, BY-COVID serves as a demonstrator of interdisciplinary work across country borders. The project's outputs will allow scientists across multiple domains, including SMEs and industry, to access varied data with the potential to generate new knowledge on infectious diseases.

ECRIN's role in BY-COVID

In BY-COVID, ECRIN is involved in promoting the FAIRification of clinical trial data with a focus on COVID-19 and other infectious disease studies, as well as,  building capacity for future pandemic preparedness. ECRIN is doing so by developing tools such as the ECRIN Clinical Research Metadata Repository and a clinical research data repository for Individual Participant Data and fine-tuning them according to the needs of the respective communities.