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ReCoDID (‘Reconciliation of Cohort data in Infectious Diseases’) is a Horizon 2020 project funded by the European Commission (EC) and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).
The project had its inaugural kick-off meeting on 6-7 May 2019 in Heidelberg, Germany. The consortium brings together a multidisciplinary team from four continents to fast track research response to infectious diseases by facilitating data and sample sharing across infectious disease cohort studies. ReCoDID is coordinated by Dr. Thomas Jaenisch at the Institute of Global Health at Heidelberg University Hospital.
The idea for the project was conceived when Dr. Jaenisch and colleagues from ZIKAlliance – a multinational and multi-disciplinary research consortium comprised of 54 partners worldwide and funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme – had to cope with the challenging task to combine large data sets across the three EU-funded Zika cohort projects (including ZikaPLAN and ZIKAction), in order to enable researchers to ask public-health relevant questions about Zika virus (ZIKV) in the merged data sets. This same issue was also discussed with colleagues from COMPARE and EVAg projects, two EU-funded initiatives working, respectively, on bringing in new data types for infectious disease research that require novel data infrastructure, data sharing rules, and analytics; and on the development of collaborative repositories for infectious disease research. Based on the insights and expertise of these three consortia, the idea of establishing ReCoDID to tackle this important issue took shape.
The ReCoDID team hopes to create new tools and a novel model of data-sharing across different but equal partners, that will facilitate cohorts’ use of their own epidemiological and high-dimensional omics data, and that will favour a better connection between researchers and the Open Science community. Moreover, the overall vision animating ReCoDID contributes to the acceleration and development of personalized medicine approaches to the identification, prevention, and treatment of (emerging) infectious diseases through global partnerships involving partners in the disease-endemic countries in the Global South.
The ZIKAlliance project mentioned above, coordinated by Prof. Xavier de Lamballerie at Inserm, France, will serve as one of ReCoDID’s major contributors, for example by providing the required data to foster development of the proposed analytical tools. ZIKAlliance’s work focusses on the outcomes of ZIKV infection during pregnancy; in order to pursue its research objectives ZIKAlliance collaborates with ZikaPLAN and ZIKAction, with which it actively engages in cross-cohort research.
The existence of a tight connection between ZIKAlliance, COMPARE, EVAg, and ReCoDID will allow for the continued analysis of data past the life of the ZIKAlliance project and, at the same time, it will seek to promote the open sharing of information between the three EU-funded Zika consortia and the scientific community.
