(1350-C) NCATS OpenData Portal: a scalable open science platform to share and explore SARS-CoV-2 screening data
Tuesday, February 6, 2024
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EST
Location: Exhibit Halls AB
Abstract: Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, biomedical scientists around the world have mobilized to understand the disease and develop therapeutic interventions to mitigate its impact. Numerous drug repurposing and mechanistic screens have been undertaken against the virus, though the results of these studies are often shared incompletely or slowly. Rapid and open sharing of complete screening datasets, including inactive compounds and matched counterscreen datasets, would greatly accelerate the research and discovery process essential to the COVID-19 pandemic response.
Recognizing this need, in the Spring of 2020, NCATS developed an online resource - named the OpenData Portal - to rapidly share complete datasets from its large panel of target-based SARS-CoV-2 screening campaigns. This living resource 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 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.
As a partner in NIH’s ACTIV public-private partnership, the OpenData Portal was significantly expanded to curate and disseminate variant therapeutic data. In support of this mission, OpenData Portal maintains the most comprehensive public database of in vitro therapeutic activity data available against known variants, and which is updated routinely. This resource not only provides 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 by government and industry to help guide decision-making.
The resource has continued to adapt as the therapeutic landscape shifted, adding several new resources to track additional datatypes in the domain of COVID-19 therapeutics, including vaccine booster data and summary data on COVID-19 real-world evidence studies, among others.
Although the OpenData Portal was built in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, this resource was designed to provide a scalable, established platform to enable data-sharing for future screens, regardless of disease. The resource has pushed the boundaries of open science adoption at NIH, HHS and beyond, and perhaps most importantly, has built the foundation for a transformative new platform of data sharing and drug repurposing that will accelerate discovery at NCATS and ETB well beyond COVID-19.