SWAT Team Description: Provide cross-cutting support to COVID-19 vaccine developers in the area of diagnostics, standards, assays and animal models.

Co-Leads: Paul Kristiansen (CEPI) and Ivana Knezevic (WHO)

          

GISAID

GISAID-CEPI Partnership

Goal: to enable rapid collection and sharing of open-access genomic and epidemiological data critical for vaccine development.

The GISAID Initiative

Mission:

  • Enabling rapid and open access to epidemic and pandemic virus data
  • Empowerment and capacity building
  • Development of novel tools for analysis of genomic datasets

The GISAID Initiative promotes the rapid sharing of data from all influenza viruses and the coronavirus causing COVID-19. This includes genetic sequence and related clinical and epidemiological data associated with human viruses, and geographical as well as species-specific data associated with avian and other animal viruses, to help researchers understand how viruses evolve and spread during epidemics and pandemics.

GISAID does so by overcoming disincentive hurdles and restrictions, which discourage or prevented sharing of virological data prior to formal publication.

The Initiative ensures that open access to data in GISAID is provided free-of-charge to all individuals that agreed to identify themselves and agreed to uphold the GISAID sharing mechanism governed through its Database Access Agreement. For more information, please access the GISAID website here. 

hCoV-19 Spike Glycoprotein Mutation Surveillance Dashboard

  • The dashboard is updated in real-time based on submissions made to GISAID Initiative’s global hCoV genome database.

hCoV-19 / SARS-CoV-2 Variants Tracker

  • The tracker is updated in real-time based on submissions made to GISAID Initiative’s global hCoV genome database

GISAID-CEPI COVID-19 UPDATES

March 2021

CEPI’s Partnership with GISAID: CEPI and GISAID established a partnership agreement in 2020, under which a first project was launched in mid-2020 to support and expand GISAID’s work and to provide genomic analyses of targets for COVID-19 vaccine development. CEPI has awarded the GISAID Initiative 1.3 million USD in support of their work.