The Pandemic Research Infrastructure (PaRi) project invited to negotiate research funding
Written by Marianne Knudsen
Recently, the Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration (NeIC) invited a research project, that will focus on the collection and use of data in connection with research in COVID-19 and other pandemics, to negotiate about research funding.
The PaRI (Pandemic Research Infrastructure) project partners say:
“The ongoing once-in-a-century pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‑19) is caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, also known as SARS‑CoV‑2. With the technological advantage over the last decade, it is possible to track the virus in near-real time. This is unprecedented and causes new challenges in data management and research infrastructures to enable an exceptional number of individual researchers performing multiple analyses in parallel, using publicly available data.”
The NeIC PaRI (Pandemic Research Infrastructure) project will:
- Facilitate collection and storage of sequence and other human related COVID-19 data
- Facilitate Nordic analysis of Nordic pandemic data using the open, web-based platform for computational biomedical research, Galaxy, and research e-infrastructure in the Nordics.
- Deploy Secure cloud infrastructure for sharing and presentation of pandemic research datasets and results.
- Contribute to building the evolutionary tree of viral strains, based on ribonucleic acid (RNA) sequences of patient samples infected with coronavirus as they become known and shared.
- Intend to make the viral and host data collected during pandemic findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) by supporting seamless cross-border access, and adopting data representation standards by existing federated sharing platforms, e.g. European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA). Work in close collaboration with other Nordic e-Infrastructure projects in addition to EU projects to support the use cases.