The university has joined forces with computer tech company Oracle’s Global Pathogen Analysis System (GPAS) which is now being used by organisations on nearly every continent to quickly find new Covid variants.
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It comes after the fast spread of the highly infectious Delta variant underscores the need for faster identification of Covid mutations.
Uniting governments and medical communities in this challenge, GPAS is now being used by institutions such as the University of Montreal Hospital Centre Research Centre, the Institute of Public Health Research of Chile and the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Vietnam.
It is being provided as a free resource to help combat Covid and other microbial health threats.
Built using Oxford’s Scalable Pathogen Pipeline Platform (SP3), Oracle APEX, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), the GPAS is a cloud platform that provides a unified system for analysing and comparing the annotated genomic sequence data of SARS-CoV-2.
Researchers are using the system to upload pathogen data and receive comprehensive results within minutes.
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With user permission, the results may be shared with participating laboratories around the globe in a secure environment.
It is hoped that making this data comprehensible and shareable will help public health authorities evaluate and plan their response by giving them invaluable insight into emerging variants even before they are officially designated as Variants of Concern.
Derrick Crook, professor of microbiology in the University of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Medicine, said: “GPAS is the first industry standards-based service anywhere in the world, offering a standardised sequence data analysis service for users on the cloud.
“Users will be able to access, upload and process their sequence data fully under their sovereign control and receive back fully analysed data in as little as 20 minutes of successful upload. If they select to share data, they will contribute to electronic dashboard visualisations of global data revealing the daily changes in the way the pandemic is progressing and how the virus is changing.
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“This will enable continuous assessment of the pandemic and help guide national and global interventions to curb the impact of the virus.”
Using the platform, researchers and governments will be able to quickly access the timely, relevant data they need to make up-to-date scientific analysis and better informed policy and safety decisions regarding new variants.
To get involved in this initiative, go to www.gpas.cloud.
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