Prototype for epidemic tracking tool wins Open Science Prize

Real-time Evolutionary Tracking for Pathogen Surveillance and Epidemiological Investigation won the grand prize of the Open Science Prize for their prototype online platform, nextstrain.org, which uses real-time visualization and viral genome data to track the spread of global pathogens.

To further innovative solutions that will benefit the global research community, this international competition, led by the NIH and in collaboration with the Wellcome Trust and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), awarded the winning team $230,000 to completely develop their digital prototype.

“Nextstrain.org aims to synthesize publicly available pathogen genomic data to arrive at an understanding of epidemic spread not available through traditional surveillance systems,” Trevor Bedford, PhD, co-leader of the nextstrain.org team from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, said in the release.

For genome sequencing of viral pathogens to provide insight into the spread of an epidemic, samples have to be collected and analyzed, and the results disseminated in near real time. Because the statistical analyses behind nextstrain.org can be conducted in minutes, researchers can see patterns of geographic spread and timings of introduction events, and can connect cases to aid contact tracing efforts. The phylogenetic analyses are then posted on the website as interactive, easy-to-understand visualizations so that researchers, public health officials and the public can keep up with the latest news on an epidemic.

As exemplified by the neststrain.org team and the 95-other multinational, interdisciplinary teams from 45 countries, the goal of the Open Science Prize competition is to communicate that sharing data through open science leads to innovation and better biomedical solutions.

“This competition hallmarks a new direction in open science funding from disease-specific efforts toward disease agnostic projects in which scalable solutions can be applied to multiple disease areas and even to solving other scientific problems,” Patti Flatley Brennan, RN, PhD, NIH interim associate director for data science and director of the National Library of Medicine, said in the release. “In many ways, the Open Science Prize is a model program and NIH is looking forward to participating in new initiatives that accelerate open data sharing.”

Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.