Grant: Team Grant: Canada-EU Data flagship collaboration

EU-CAN-SHARE builds on existing infrastructures and partnerships to develop a sustainable model for the storage, curation, and analyses of the complex data sets collected by infectious disease (ID)-related cohorts. While ID cohorts collect both clinical-epidemiological (CE) and terabytes of OMICS data, storage and analysis of CE and high dimensional laboratory (HDL) data remains separate and developing the infrastructure for housing and analysing HDL data is not feasible for individual studies. In this project, we develop innovative approaches to the synthesis and analysis of CE&HDL data, and modify governance models for cloud-based repositories elaborated by and for scientists in high-income countries to meet the specific challenges of synthesizing CE&HDL data and sharing data across international cohorts and with the Open Science community. We develop data architecture and governance that link biobanks to data repositories to facilitate equitable use, collaborative, cross-domain analyses, and replicability. The team leverages partnerships with multicentre ID cohorts in the global South, and connects EU investments in OMICS infrastructures with Canadian expertise on pipeline and workflow development, biostatistical methods, and ethical and governance issues related to the establishment of repositories for CE&HDL data in resource-limited settings. Drawing from best practice and governance elaborated for similar initiatives, the repository will employ a federated model where a tiered permission system and cohort-specific hubs facilitate cohorts' analysis of their own data, cross-cohort analyses, and connections with the open science community within a clearly elaborated legal, ethical, and equitable framework. The cloud-based platform will provide analytic tools and computational power to facilitate cross-domain, collaborative analyses that inform personalized medicine approaches to diagnostic, treatment, and vaccine development in ID-focused international cohorts.