Scope

Scope

The purpose of the ODAP is to facilitate biomedical research to advance understanding of severe infectious disease*, critical illness, and other exposures of public health interest.** Research within the ODAP is strictly limited to this purpose.

* Severe infectious disease - this term describes all infectious agents with the potential to cause critical illness, including new, re-emerging or therapy-resistant forms of existing infectious agents.

** Other exposures of public health interest: this term describes new or unexplained poisoning, or exposure to harmful energy sources such as electromagnetic radiation.

Examples

Examples of in-scope research:

  • Understanding the evolution and biology of SARS-CoV-2.
  • Understanding the epidemiology and transmission of SARS-CoV-2.
  • Characterising COVID-19 disease risk, severity and outcomes.
  • Understanding the host genetics of susceptibility to, and outcomes from, critical illness.
  • Monitoring and understanding the impact of non-pharmacological interventions against SARS-CoV-2 transmissions and COVID-19 disease.
  • Monitoring, understanding, and assessing the impact of treatments, vaccines and prior infections in COVID-19 disease.
  • Analysing or modelling SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 data for future pandemic preparedness.

Examples of out of scope activities

  • Their research questions primarily focusses on a non-infectious disease area with incidental involvement of infectious disease (Focussed on a pathogen with no potential public health concern)

The Platform

Our UKRI-supported platform based at the University of Edinburgh is a trusted research environment (TRE) running on a high-performance computing space that holds data securely allowing academic and public health researchers access following a ‘five safes’ (http://www.fivesafes.org) research application and governance process.

Once granted access for a defined research project researchers can then make use of multiple datasets in the ODAP, handling sensitive data in the trusted research environment where it can be analysed along with non-sensitive data such as human and viral genomes.

During COVID-19

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK has generated several globally unique research data assets that have enabled critical discoveries which have shaped the COVID-19 response in the UK and globally. Examples of these data assets include sequencing of the SARS-CoV-2 virus itself, sequencing of the DNA of patients with severe COVID-19 in intensive care, and the systematic capture of detailed clinical record information. While each of these data sets alone have generated transformational knowledge - conducting joint analysis of multiple data sets has the potential to yield further significant discoveries.

The ODAP holds unique aggregation of UK sovereign data assets, including the complete data resources of the ISARIC4C/CO-CIN (clinical characterisation of COVID-19 patients), GenOMICC (host genetics of severe COVID-19 patients), PHOSP (follow up of COVID-19 patients), HEAL COVID (trial), and UK-CIC (immunology of COVID-19 patients) studies, together with COG-UK (SARS-CoV-2 viral sequence from ~15% of all cases) data from England and Scotland, and linkage to the RECOVERY trial, NHS clinical records, national vaccination records, critical care audit data (SICSAG) and mortality records. Linkage to ICNARC CMP has already been agreed.

The ODAP partnership aims to facilitate vital research on the impact of SARS-CoV-2 genetic and phenotypic variation on disease severity and vaccine efficacy by creating additional data linkages, automating data flows and analyses, and democratising access to research datasets with full agreement from the contributing studies. ODAP partnership is an overarching grouping of UK data generators and provides oversight, strategic guidance and governance to the ODAP platform.