COMPARE

COMPARE aims to harness the rapid advances in molecular technology to improve identification and mitigation of emerging infectious diseases and foodborne outbreaks. To this purpose, COMPARE will establish a “One serves all” analytical framework and data exchange platform that will allow real-time analysis and interpretation of sequence-based pathogen data in combination with associated data (e.g. clinical, epidemiological data) in an integrated inter-sectorial, inter-disciplinary, international, “One Health” approach.

The framework will link research, clinical and public health organizations active in human health, animal health, and food safety in Europe and beyond, to develop 

• integrated risk assessment and risk-based collection of samples and data, 
• harmonised workflows for generating comparable sequence and associated data, 
• state-of-the-art analytical workflows and tools for generating actionable information for support of patient diagnosis, treatment, outbreak detection and investigation, and 
• risk communication tools.

The analytical workflows will be linked to a flexible, scalable and open-source data and information platform supporting rapid sharing, interrogation and analysis of sequence-based pathogen data in combination with other associated data.

The platform will be linked to existing and future complementary systems, networks and databases such as those used by ECDC, NCBI and EFSA. The functionalities of the system will be tested and fine-tuned through underpinning research studies on priority pathogens covering healthcare-associated infections, foodborne disease, and (zoonotic) (re-) emerging diseases with epidemic or pandemic potential.

Throughout the project, extensive consultations with future users, studies into the barriers to open data sharing, dissemination and training activities and studies on the cost-effectiveness of the system will support future sustainable user uptake.