Data, disease and diplomacy: GISAID's innovative contribution to global health

By Stefan Elbe, Gemma L. Buckland-Merrett. Global Challenges, 2017

1,889 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The international sharing of virus data is critical for protecting populations against lethal infectious disease outbreaks. Scientists must rapidly share information to assess the nature of the threat and develop new medical countermeasures. Governments need the data to trace the extent of the outbreak, initiate public health responses, and coordinate access to medicines and vaccines. Recent outbreaks suggest, however, that the sharing of such data cannot be taken for granted – making the timely international exchange of virus data a vital global challenge. This article undertakes the first analysis of the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data as an innovative policy effort to promote the international sharing of genetic and associated influenza virus data. Based on more than 20 semi‐structured interviews conducted with key informants in the international community, coupled with analysis of a wide range of primary and secondary sources, the article finds that the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data contributes to global health in at least five ways: (1) collating the most complete repository of high‐quality influenza data in the world; (2) facilitating the rapid sharing of potentially pandemic virus information during recent outbreaks; (3) supporting the World Health Organization's biannual seasonal flu vaccine strain selection process; (4) developing informal mechanisms for conflict resolution around the sharing of virus data; and (5) building greater trust with several countries key to global pandemic preparedness.

Subfields: Epidemiology, Infectious Diseases, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2707e64c6503d652a6b5ceb503fdfc8093f674e4

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Citations in the corpus

Structure, Function, and Antigenicity of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike Glycoprotein (2020, positive): “Analysis of the 104 SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences available from GISAID (Elbe and Buckland-Merrett, 2017) shows that 8 out of these 14 positions are strictly conserved in SARS-CoV-2 SB whereas the other 6 positions are (semi)-conservatively substituted: R426SARS-CoVN448SARS-CoV-2, Y442SARS-CoVL464SARS”
Deep Mutational Scanning of SARS-CoV-2 Receptor Binding Domain Reveals Constraints on Folding and ACE2 Binding (2020, positive): “Last, we validated our deepmutational scanning for mutations that are especially prevalent among naturally occurring sequences in GISAID.”
Mapping Neutralizing and Immunodominant Sites on the SARS-CoV-2 Spike Receptor-Binding Domain by Structure-Guided High-Resolution Serology (2020, positive): “Numerous amino acid substitutions have been detected in the RBD, with several of them found in the RBM (including the S2H13 and S2H14 epitopes), of the 74,000 SARS-CoV-2 isolates available to date in the GISAID database (Elbe and Buckland-Merrett, 2017).”
Deep mutational scanning of SARS-CoV-2 receptor binding domain reveals constraints on folding and ACE2 binding (2020, positive): “To assess the phenotypic impacts of mutations that have appeared in the SARS-CoV-2 RBD to date, we downloaded all 31,570 spike sequences available from GISAID (Elbe and Buckland-Merrett, 2017) on May 27, 2020, and identified RBD amino-acid mutations present in high-quality clinical isolates.”
Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag (2020, methodology): “sequences sequence alignment of the spike glycoprotein amino acid sequences of all available coronaviruses (n=55) [refer Table S.File1] in NCBI refseq (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) this includes one sequence of 2019-nCoV[Fig We retrieved all the available coronavirus sequences (n=55) from NCBI viral genome dat”
Outbreak.info genomic reports: scalable and dynamic surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 variants and mutations (2023, positive): “For example, in December 2021, over a million new genomes were submitted to GISAID [12].”
Assignment of Epidemiological Lineages in an Emerging Pandemic Using the Pangolin Tool (2021, background): “…involved in the global SARS-CoV-2 genome sequencing effort and continuing to share data on GISAID (https://www.gisaid.org/; last accessed: 29 June 2021, Elbe and Buckland-Merrett 2017), contributing to open science and enabling tools like pangolin to represent the latest diversity of SARS-CoV-2.”