The software tool was developed by researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the University of Basel. They use it to track Zika, Ebola and other viral disease outbreaks in real time. The software tool has won the first-ever international Open Science Prize, after three rounds of competition — one of which involved a public vote.
Fred Hutch evolutionary biologist Dr. Trevor Bedford and physicist and computational biologist Dr. Richard Neher of the Biozentum Center for Molecular Life Studies in Basel, Switzerland, designed a prototype called nextstrain. It analyzed and tracked genetic mutations during the recent Ebola and Zika outbreaks. The researchers also built a separate platform called nextflu for influenza.
“Everyone is doing sequencing, but most people aren’t able to analyze their sequences as well or as quickly as they might want to,” Bedford said. “We’re trying to fill in this gap so that the World Health Organization or the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — or whoever — can have better analysis tools to do what they do. We’re hoping that will get our software in the hands of a lot of people.”
For now, the tool can be used for Zika and Ebola. Adapting the platform for other pathogens still involves a fair amount of work and technical skill. By lowering the technical bar, he and Neher hope to nudge researchers to overcome another obstacle: a longstanding reluctance to share data. That is also a goal of the Open Science Prize.
Bedford praised both runner-up teams as doing “really fantastic work.”
For all of its cutting-edge technology, nextstrain, the winning project, belongs to a long tradition of using data visualization to understand — and intervene in — outbreaks, dating back to the 1854 London cholera outbreak. “What we’re doing with nextstrain is meant to be in this tradition,” he said. “Right now it’s more of a ‘now-cast,’ but we really want to be doing a real-time forecast of what’s going on with an epidemic.”
Real-time tracking of genetic mutations during disease outbreaks helps scientists discern what makes viruses so severe and inform public health efforts to contain them. Being able to do so depends on researchers openly sharing the genetic sequencing data, something that not all scientists embrace in a competitive world where researchers rush to publish in prestigious journals and stake claims to discoveries.
Relatively early in the outbreak, researchers sequenced Ebola genomes from patients and immediately uploaded them to the public database GenBank, leading to a surge of collaboration from experts in diverse fields. The collection of shared, publically available data helped answer critically important questions as the epidemic was unfolding. It added to the confirmation that that the outbreak was being sustained by human-to-human contact, not contact with bats or other animal carriers, suggested probable transmission routes and revealed where and how fast mutations in the virus were occurring — all information crucial to both public health and medical interventions.
“I’m not seeing the same thing with Zika,” said Dr. Gytis Dudas, a postdoctoral fellow in Bedford’s laboratory who worked on many of the Ebola analyses. In part, Dudas said, the Zika virus is more difficult to sequence than Ebola, making researchers more likely to guard their rare sequences for publications.
Fred Hutch evolutionary biologist Dr. Trevor Bedford and physicist and computational biologist Dr. Richard Neher of the Biozentum Center for Molecular Life Studies in Basel, Switzerland, designed a prototype called nextstrain. It analyzed and tracked genetic mutations during the recent Ebola and Zika outbreaks. The researchers also built a separate platform called nextflu for influenza.
Nextstrain platform
Using the nextstrain platform, anyone can download the source code from the public-access code-sharing site GitHub, run genetic sequencing data for the outbreak they are following through the pipeline and build a web page showing a phylogenetic tree, or genetic history of the outbreak, in a few minutes, Bedford said. He and Neher want the tool to be made adaptable for any virus — a goal to which they will apply their $230,000 prize, sponsored by the U.S. National Institutes of Health,British-based charitable foundation Wellcome Trust and the U.S.-based Howard Hughes Medical Institute.“Everyone is doing sequencing, but most people aren’t able to analyze their sequences as well or as quickly as they might want to,” Bedford said. “We’re trying to fill in this gap so that the World Health Organization or the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — or whoever — can have better analysis tools to do what they do. We’re hoping that will get our software in the hands of a lot of people.”
For now, the tool can be used for Zika and Ebola. Adapting the platform for other pathogens still involves a fair amount of work and technical skill. By lowering the technical bar, he and Neher hope to nudge researchers to overcome another obstacle: a longstanding reluctance to share data. That is also a goal of the Open Science Prize.
Sharing data speeds discoveries
As “Open science” supporters, as Bedford and Neher believe, that sharing preliminary information quickly speeds discoveries, including those that could improve human health, and is therefore good for both science and society. The Open Science Prize competition aimed to stimulate the development of ground-breaking tools and platforms to make it easier for researchers and the wider public to share and find publications, datasets, code and other research outputs as well as to “generate excitement, momentum and further investment” in doing so, according to the prize sponsors.Six teams of finalists
Bedford and Neher were among six teams of finalists chosen in May from 96 entries representing 450 innovators and 45 countries. In January, a public vote (3,730 votes from 76 countries, to be precise) narrowed the field to three.Bedford praised both runner-up teams as doing “really fantastic work.”
- MyGene2 is designed to help people with rare diseases share health and genetic information with other families, clinicians and researcher worldwide.
- OpenTrialsFDA is aimed at making it easier to find information from clinical trials that was reported to the federal Food and Drug Administration but never published in academic journals.
For all of its cutting-edge technology, nextstrain, the winning project, belongs to a long tradition of using data visualization to understand — and intervene in — outbreaks, dating back to the 1854 London cholera outbreak. “What we’re doing with nextstrain is meant to be in this tradition,” he said. “Right now it’s more of a ‘now-cast,’ but we really want to be doing a real-time forecast of what’s going on with an epidemic.”
Real-time tracking of genetic mutations during disease outbreaks helps scientists discern what makes viruses so severe and inform public health efforts to contain them. Being able to do so depends on researchers openly sharing the genetic sequencing data, something that not all scientists embrace in a competitive world where researchers rush to publish in prestigious journals and stake claims to discoveries.
Lessons from Ebola
The seed for nextstrain sprouted while Bedford was doing postdoctoral research at the University of Michigan. He had published a paper on flu migration using data up to 2010. He found himself thinking what a pity it was that the analysis couldn’t be updated as new data came out. But the fact that a paper had already been published was a disincentive for anyone to write a new paper with just a small update to the data. From that frustration, nextflu was born. Nextflu led to nextstrain. The devastating 2013-2016 Ebola epidemic in West Africa leant the project new urgency.Relatively early in the outbreak, researchers sequenced Ebola genomes from patients and immediately uploaded them to the public database GenBank, leading to a surge of collaboration from experts in diverse fields. The collection of shared, publically available data helped answer critically important questions as the epidemic was unfolding. It added to the confirmation that that the outbreak was being sustained by human-to-human contact, not contact with bats or other animal carriers, suggested probable transmission routes and revealed where and how fast mutations in the virus were occurring — all information crucial to both public health and medical interventions.
Speed is everything
Even when data is shared, speed is everything in responding to outbreaks, so any tool that speeds data analysis contributes to the effort. But despite the precedent set by the response to the Ebola epidemic, fewer researchers have shared Zika virus genome sequences from the more recent crisis in Brazil, Central America and the Caribbean, the researchers said.“I’m not seeing the same thing with Zika,” said Dr. Gytis Dudas, a postdoctoral fellow in Bedford’s laboratory who worked on many of the Ebola analyses. In part, Dudas said, the Zika virus is more difficult to sequence than Ebola, making researchers more likely to guard their rare sequences for publications.
