BY-COVID funds projects to build national capacity for pandemic preparedness

5 June 2024

Image for the BY-COVID news pages

Following an open call, BY-COVID has funded two projects to build national capacity for pandemic preparedness and enhance the diversity of data types which can be connected. Each project receives 60K Euros and is required to complete by September 2024.

Enhancing Slovakia's respiratory disease surveillance: integrating the national system with global data hubs and expanding local capacities

Science Park, Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia

Activities will extend the existing national system and reshape it to be more adaptive, ensuring that researchers, scientists and policymakers have timely and accurate information. The monitoring system will be extended beyond SARS-CoV-2 to encompass a broader range of respiratory diseases.

A validation and submission tool to facilitate virus data flow into the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) via secure intermediate storage

Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany & NFDI4Microbiota consortium

The project will enhance the VirJenDB database, a central hub connecting virus researchers to publicly available virus resources, metadata and sequences. The VirJenDB virus data model will be aligned with the SARS-CoV-2 data model used in the Data Hubs. Validation and submission of especially German virus sequences and data to the ENA repository will be supported and promoted.

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