An OpenData Portal to share SARS-CoV-2 drug repurposing data in real time

National Center For Advancing Translational Sciences

Investigators

Abstract

This collaborative NCATS team took a more open approach and chose to rapidly share their data and efforts with the world on an unprecedented timeline. By sharing their results in advance of any formal publications, this multidisciplinary team made the vision of the OpenData Portal a reality. These efforts selflessly provided a large foundation of SARS-CoV-2 research early in the pandemic, providing researchers across the globe with proof-of-concept data to help guide their hypotheses and nascent research on the virus. The Portal has helped set a new standard for data sharing and embodied the NCATS mission to accelerate research to aid patients more quickly. To date, the OpenData Portal has rapidly shared more than half a million data points of drug repurposing screens against SARS-CoV-2, featuring 10,000 approved drugs or well-characterized compounds tested against more than a dozen SARS-CoV-2 targets and assays, all of which has been shared freely and completely with the global community. This immense dataset has already been used by external groups to build and refine predictive models of potential SARS-CoV-2 therapeutics. The resource this team built continues to serve as a primary SARS-CoV-2 data hub for the NIH and is constantly expanding to meet the open science needs of the public and private SARS-CoV-2 research communities as the pandemic evolves. During this period, the project team outlined new ways for the site to share SARS-CoV-2 data and enrich the public body of knowledge on the virus. The Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines (ACTIV) program worked with the OpenData Portal as the platform for its variant data sharing efforts, and the resource was significantly expanded to curate and disseminate variant therapeutic data as part of the ACTIV Tracking Resistance And Coronavirus Evolution (TRACE) Working Group. In support of this mission to track and estimate impact of emerging variant threats, OpenData Portal maintains the most comprehensive public database of in vitro therapeutic activity data available against known variants, and which is updated with breaking data on a weekly basis. The Variants & Therapeutics pages not only provide a unique and powerful view into this data, but also set a standard for openness in COVID-19 data sharing by providing open download access to all underlying activity and metadata. This curation effort has become an integral part of numerous governmental COVID-19 response efforts, and OpenData Portal variant data is utilized to help guide decision-making across the government. Beyond in vitro data, OpenData Portal also worked with ACTIV to host its animal model pages and field guides. From early in the pandemic, these pages have been a comprehensive and up-to-date resource on the animal models being developed to study COVID-19. These pages are complemented by the OpenData In vivo Variant Studies database, which collects metadata on datasets and publications that have reported on COVID-19 challenge studies using in vivo models.