Part of the nextspain.uv.es analysis platform. Credit: Giuseppe D’Auria, FISABIO.

The project is led by Fernando González, professor of Genetics at the University of Valencia and researcher at the Institute of Integrative Systems Biology and at FISABIO, and Iñaki Comas (Institute of Biomedicine of Valencia). More than 40 clinical microbiology units from hospitals throughout Spain and sequencing centers will participate. The Global Health platform of the Higher Scientific Research Council (CSIC), co-financed by the MAPFRE Foundation, has selected the project, along with 11 others, as part of the initiatives to address the Covid-19 pandemic.

The research project Addressing unknowns of COVID-19 transmission and infection combining pathogen genomics and epidemiology to inform public health interventions has a budget of 740,800 euros, and its objective is a comparative study. of the genomes of the new coronavirus from patients with the Covid-19 disease to understand and predict its evolution and epidemiology in space and time.

The initiative will be carried out by researchers from the Institute of Integrative Systems Biology (I2SysBio), belonging to the CSIC and the Universitat de València; from the Institute of Biomedicine of Valencia (IBV), from the CSIC; as well as the Foundation for the Promotion of Health and Biomedical Research (FISABIO) of the Generalitat Valenciana.

Iñaki Comas, CSIC scientist at the IBV and principal investigator of the project, explains that this project will allow the incorporation of genomic epidemiology as a tool to understand the course of the epidemic, how it originated and how it is evolving in time and space. It also highlights that this research does not only have an academic aspect, but also poses the challenge of generating results that serve to inform public health authorities. For his part, Fernando González Candelas, researcher at I2SysBio and FISABIO, has highlighted the geographical scale of the project that covers hospitals throughout Spain and points out that “although there is a general impact by COVID-19, the reality is that each community is in a different epidemic phase and, therefore, the medium-term solutions must be different.”

The data generated will be deposited in public repositories, as well as on the platform. global NextStrain (nextstrain.org) from which a Spanish node has been derived that is already integrating Spanish sequence data (nextspain.uv.es). The platform implements very powerful visualization tools to follow the evolution of the virus in space and time. Both researchers responsible for the project, specialists in genomic epidemiology, highlight the power of combining genomic data, clinical microbiology, epidemiology and phylogenetics. “Genomic epidemiology will represent infectious diseases in the 21st century, what vaccines represented in the 19th century or antibiotics in the 20th century,” added Iñaki Comas.

Interdisciplinary Thematic Platform (PTI)
This project has been financed, along with 11 others, by the CSIC Global Health Interdisciplinary Thematic Platform (PTI), in which more than 150 research groups and has the support of the MAPFRE Foundation. Jesús Marco, Vice President of Scientific and Technical Research of the CSIC, highlighted that "one of the keys to this PTI Global Health is to have a global vision that allows all aspects of the pandemic to be linked: origin, prevention, disease, containment measures, treatment, social impact, and finally the need for communication to society, particularly in education." The platform, promoted by the Vice Presidency of Scientific and Technical Research of the CSIC, is coordinated by the researcher at the Severo Ochoa Molecular Biology Center (CBMSO) Margarita del Val, supported by a committee of experts in the different areas involved.

Caption:
nextspain.uv.es is the platform for analyzing data derived from Spanish sequences based on the international platform nextstrain.org. It integrates genomic and phylogenetic analysis (left) of the sequences to infer geographic movement patterns (right). Credit: Giuseppe d’Auria, FISABIO.

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