New Data Repository Will Support Pandemic Research

A new project dubbed ORCHESTRA is seeking to act as a central source for COVID-19 patient data. The data will support ongoing COVID-19 medical research from institutions around the world. The ORCHESTRA project is led by the High-Performance Computing Center of Stuttgart (HLRS) and includes a consortium of 27 institutions from 15 countries in Europe, Africa, South America, and Asia.

According to the press release, “During the pandemic, medical centers in Europe and around the world have accumulated masses of patient data describing patient characteristics, treatment plans, and disease progression. Currently, however, patient data is largely gathered and saved by different healthcare providers in their own local databases, with few connections between them. Because modern biological and epidemiological studies benefit from the computational analysis of large datasets, bringing this information together would provide investigators with a valuable resource that could be mined for clues to improve the fight against the disease.”

HLRS will build a computing infrastructure and data management framework for collecting, storing, integrating, and sharing the data.