The Connecting European COVID-19 Cohorts to Increase Common and Effective Response to SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic (ORCHESTRA) consortium brings together key European academic and research institution experts in infectious diseases, Data Management and High Performance Computing from 26 organizations, in order to provide an innovative approach to learn from the SARS-CoV-2 crisis and derive recommendations to be better prepared in case of future waves and pandemics.
The ORCHESTRA project aims to respond to this need through the creation of a new pan-European cohort built on existing and new large-scale population cohorts in European and non-European countries.
CINECA is the coordinator of the “Data Management” work package 7, in charge of the development of the platform that will collect data from the various cohorts involved.
Together with Cines and HLR, Cineca will be responsible to design and deploy a federated architecture based on three layers: National Data Providers, National Hubs and the centralized Orchestra Portal. Moreover, Charitè of Berlin is in charge to identify and define common data standards to improve health data interoperability and enable data processing across cohorts and institutions and to ensure that all uses of personal/sensitive data comply with the EU GDPR.
The project started in December 2020 and has already reached several milestones.
In coordination with the European Commission, the ORCHESTRA team will consult with the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA), in particular when it comes to making available data in real time that can be of value for shaping the continuously evolving public health and vaccine strategies.