Our unique data-sharing platform provides a portal for collaboration across the infectious diseases clinical management and research communities. By sharing data and providing a platform for collaboration, we will enable the research community to maximise resources, prioritise research, leverage existing knowledge and accelerate outputs.
IDDO is unique among data-sharing initiatives in taking many different types of data and standardising these to create larger-scale datasets to enable global research collaborations to pose new scientific questions. It identifies and prioritises research questions; provides tools and resources that improve the design and quality of clinical studies; standardises and pools individual-patient data; and facilitates complex meta-analyses to generate evidence on the efficacy of existing medicines, inform the development of new ones and advance understanding of disease.
Infectious diseases and emerging infections disproportionately impact low- and middle- income countries (LMICs) and IDDO is committed to ensuring that its infrastructure and systems boosts the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Re-use (FAIR) of data. This helps to ensure that the communities most affected are central to the equitable and sustainable development of better treatment and control of infectious diseases, translating data into evidence that improves outcomes for patients worldwide.
Proposals to launch new research themes originate from those in, or working with, disease endemic research communities. This community-driven process with early engagement of advocates in the regions most affected, often in resource-limited settings, is one of the key steps in delivering successful outcomes.
IDDO is building upon the success of the WorldWide Antimalarial Resistance Network (WWARN) and drawing upon WWARN’s methods, structure and programmes, applying this expertise, developed for malaria, to a variety of infections. Currently, IDDO has eight active areas of research work: COVID-19, malaria, febrile illness, Ebola, visceral leishmaniasis, medicine quality, schistosomiasis/soil-transmitted helminthiases, and Chagas disease, with more already in development or being scoped for feasibility.
Our goal is to reduce the impact of neglected and emerging infections and save lives.
