ORCHESTRA

The aim of the ORCHESTRA (Connecting European Cohorts to Increase Common and Effective Response to SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic) project is the creation of a new large-scale pan-European cohort, in order to significantly improve responsiveness to SARS-CoV-2 and provide a model for responsiveness for new public health threats.

ORCHESTRA provides an innovative approach to learn from the pandemic SARS-CoV-2 crisis and derive recommendations to be better prepared in case of a further waves and future pandemics. The ORCHESTRA project aims to deliver sound scientific evidence for the prevention and treatment of the infections caused by SARS-CoV-2 assessing epidemiological, clinical, microbiological, and genotypic aspects of population, environment and socio-economic features. The project builds up on existing and new large scale population cohorts in Europe (France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Romania, Netherlands, Portugal, Luxemburg, and Slovakia) and non-European countries (India, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Congo, and Gabon) including SARS-CoV-2 infected and non-infected individuals of all ages and conditions. The main outcome of ORCHESTRA is the creation of a new pan-European cohort applying homogenous protocols for data collection, data sharing, sampling, and follow up, which can rapidly advance the knowledge on the control and management of the COVID-19. ORCHESTRA will also include SARS-CoV-2-negative individuals and thereby enable a prospective follow-up and an analysis of vaccination response when vaccines will be available. The new ORCHESTRA platform responds thus to an urgent need and provides a rapid and coordinated solution to protect the general populations and deliver the best care to affected individuals.

The High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) will contribute its expertise in research data management, big data and data engineering to ORCHESTRA. Within the project, HLRS helps to build the federated research architecture for cohort analysis based on three layers: National Data Providers, National Hubs and the centralized Orchestra Portal. The HLRS will lead the implementation of the National hubs throughout the project partners and act as the National Hub in Germany for the cohort data. Moreover the HLRS be participating in the design and implementation of the ORCHESTRA portal platform.