THE COVID-19 - HOST GENETICS INITIATIVE
- Research Leader:
- https://www.covid19hg.org/
- Institution:
- European Consortium
The COVID-19 pandemic is a global crisis creating severe disruptions across the economy and health system. Insights into how to better understand and treat COVID-19 are desperately needed. Given the importance and urgency in obtaining these insights, it is critical for the scientific community to come together around this shared purpose.
The COVID-19 host genetics initiative brings together the human genetics community to generate, share, and analyze data to learn the genetic determinants of COVID-19 susceptibility, severity, and outcomes. Such discoveries could help to generate hypotheses for drug repurposing, identify individuals at unusually high or low risk, and contribute to global knowledge of the biology of SARS-CoV-2 infection and disease.
Nothing is written in stone other than we must all act together and with no personal gain or ownership of results - just rapid and immediate dissemination of the maximum possible data and information that can be responsibly released.
Aims
The COVID-19 host genetics initiative is a bottom-up collaborative effort that has three main goals:
- Provide an environment to foster the sharing of resources to facilitate COVID-19 host genetics research (e.g. protocols, questionnaires).
- Organize analytical activities across studies to identify genetic determinants of COVID-19 susceptibility and severity.
- Provide a platform to share the results from such activities, as well as the individual-level data where possible, to benefit the broader scientific community.
