A prototype online platform that utilizes the real-time visualization and viral genome data to detect the spread of global pathogens like Ebola and Zika has been opted as the grand prize winner of the Open Science Prize.
The award is an international competition meant to foster creative solutions in public health and biomedicine by utilizing the open digital content.
An initiative of the National Institutes of Health, in collaboration with the Wellcome Trust and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Open Science Prize has granted $230,000 to Nextstrain.org, a website that accumulates data from researchers worldwide, conducts rapid phylogenetic analysis, and posts the results online.
Elizabeth Kittrie, strategic advisor for data and open science at NIH’s National Library of Medicine, points out that the genome sequences of viral pathogens can hive worthy insights into the spread of epidemics. Although, to be beneficial and actionable, samples have to be collected, observed and the results openly disseminated in near real-time, she asserts.
Nextstrain.org ingests viral genome sequence information from openly available sources, conducts quick phylogenetic analyses to comprehend the ancestral relationships among those pathogens and reflects the resulting phylogenetic “trees” on an interactive public website using real-time visualization, claims Kittrie.
“Nextstrain had a remarkable public health impact by increasing our ability to detect diseases across international borders,” claims Kittrie, who was the NIH lead for the Open Science Prize.
In accordance to Kittrie, without an online platform like Nextstrain.org, researchers would be left with gathering genome sequence data for viral pathogens from “whatever type of research they could glean from disparate databases and publications” made publically accessible long after an epidemic has subsided.
In those cases, she adds, the data is “much localized, and so researchers aren’t capable to see the evolution of a virus over time and space,” mostly taking years to collect and synthesize the information.
The Nextstrain.org development team was supervised by Trevor Bedford of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and Richard Neher of Biozentrum at the institute of University of Basel in Switzerland.
"Nextstrain.org targets to synthesize publicly available pathogen genomic data to arrive at an understanding of epidemic spread not available through conventional surveillance systems," stated Bedford in a written statement.
"Our attempts with Nextstrain.org are only possible through open data sharing by others in the community. We have actually enjoyed working with these teams in the field as they collect and share viral genome data,” added Neher.
In accordance to NIH, the statistical analyses behind Nextstrain.org can be conducted in minutes, disclosing patterns of geographic spread for the benefit of the international research community, which can query the database and examine the spread of disease by country, region, or kind of strain.
“This tool remarkably advances our ability to track diseases in ways that we actually could not before, and is also a model of data sharing,” summarizes Kittrie.
In the first phase of the competition, a panel of experts chose 6 multinational, interdisciplinary teams from an initial pool of 96 teams from 45 countries, who were each granted $80,000 to develop a prototype online platform. Ultimately, the 6 teams were narrowed to 3 finalists with Nextstrain.org taking the top prize. The $230,000 award will be used by Nextstrain.org to completely develop their prototype online platform.
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