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Building integrative tools for OneHealth Surveillance (EJP BeONE)

01/2020-07/2022

Funding programme / funding institution: Horizon 2020

Project homepage: https://onehealthejp.eu/jrp-beone/

Project description:

BeONE will develop an integrated surveillance dashboard in which molecular and epidemiological data for foodborne pathogens can be interactively analysed, visualized and interpreted by the relevant experts across disciplines and sectors. 

Surveillance of foodborne infections and outbreak detection/investigation is primarily handled at the national or regional level with several institutions/parties spanning different sectors and disciplines. The continuous increase in the complexity of data to be analysed and integrated, e.g. epidemiological and genomic data, as well as the need for international cooperation in solving multiple-country outbreaks enhances the needs for informatics tools that can allow integration of the various types of data and facilitate their visualization and interpretation.

Building on previous experiences and existing components, we will create a tool tailored specifically to institutions in the public health/animal health/food safety sectors that have an increasing need for jointly analyses of complex data gathered on both sides of the traditional epidemiology-microbiology boundary, and for setting up tight collaborations without jeopardizing the confidentiality of the sample providers. The need for joint analysis of integrated genomic and epidemiological data requires novel signal detection algorithms, which will be developed to facilitate a more comprehensive, reproducible, and multiple evidence-based outbreak investigation. We will introduce the use of dynamic similarity thresholds for different epidemiological situations and investigate cluster congruence between different genome sequence-based typing approaches. The developed dashboard and algorithms will aim at meeting the needs of the national institutions for communication with the EU-wide systems, e.g. TESSy and the future ECDC/EFSA joint database of genomic data. The project will bring us beyond the state of the art by developing a tailored surveillance system, facilitating consistent definition of outbreaks across domains and countries by the use of new algorithms based on integrated genomic and epidemiologic data, as well as facilitating communication and flexible data sharing.

With input from a broad range of partners and experts, the development in the project will mainly be performed by partners with experience in using molecular epidemiology, WGS and bioinformatics in the surevillance. The project aims to fulfill the needs of partners at all levels of experience and it is the goal that the project can assist a smooth and efficient transition to a WGS-based and integrated surveillance across Europe. 

Project partners

• Rijksinstituut Voor Volksgezondheid En Milieu
• Statens Serum Institute
• Instituto de Saude

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