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The BY-COVID project

BY-COVID: a new European Union project for pandemic preparedness

Published: 22 November 2021

As of today, the COVID-19 pandemic still affects the lives of millions of people globally and represents a highly complex challenge for scientists worldwide. In these settings a critical review of the technical and organizational limitations encountered by the international scientific community in the response of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic is required to raise the level of preparedness/responsiveness for ongoing and future epidemics.
These are the premises leading to BeYond-COVID (BY-COVID), a project founded by Horizon Europe and under the scientific direction of ELIXIR, which aims to develop resources, data standards and guidelines to improve data analysis and management for current and future epidemiological emergencies.
The BY-COVID project

Launched on October 13th 2021, BeYond-COVID (BY-COVID) is a project founded by Horizon Europe and led by ELIXIR, which primarily aims to facilitate the access, sharing and analysis of COVID-19 related data to establish a general model which could be used for any current and future infectious disease. The main objective of BY-COVID is to develop and share community resources, data standards and guidelines that will enable a rapid and effective response to COVID-19 and novel epidemics.
Furthermore, in an unprecedented interdisciplinary effort, the project will not focus exclusively on providing technical solutions to biological data sharing and analysis, but will also incorporate data from a broader range of disciplines, including public health, biomedic field and social sciences.
Ultimately, BY-COVID aims to improve Europe preparedness to current and future pandemics by enhancing genomic surveillance and rapid-response capabilities. The principles that drive this ambition are listed below:

  1. Mobilise data - Ensuring epidemiological data from around the world can be easily submitted to databases.
  2. Connect data - Linking sequencing data to corresponding metadata, expanding the latter beyond scientific and medical metadata (including, for example, metadata from public health and economics).
  3. Standardise data - Providing data management best practices and standards for data description.
  4. Expose and analyse data - Developing data analysis methods and protocols.

All of these encourage FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) data standards and interoperability among resources.

BeYond-COVID involves 53 partners from 19 European Countries and will run for 3 years. The project is part of the European bio-defence preparedness plan against COVID-19 variants (HERA incubator) promoted by the European Commission. The HERA incubator reunites researchers, biotech companies, manufacturers and public authorities in the EU and globally to detect new variants, provide incentives to develop new and adapted vaccines, speed up the approval process for these vaccines, and ensure scaling up of manufacturing capacities.

More information about the project and its guidelines can be found on the BY-COVID official website at the following link.

Source: BY-COVID