Establishment of COVID-19 related biobank and integrated platform for research data in Latvia

The main goal of this project is to create a well managed, secure and centralized biobank and data exchange resource to support the activities that would limit the spread of the virus, search for novel biomarkers and treatment strategies, facilitate the establishment of new international collaborations. Project will be an important part of the overarching objective of the National Research Program for mitigation of the impact of COVID-19. The main concept behind this approach is to provide centralized service for scientific groups involved in COVID-19 research limiting the unnecessary overlapping of activities related to patient recruitment, data gathering, analytical tests. The following results will be achieved within the framework of the project:1) the biobank that involves biological samples, clinical and anthropometric data from the majority of COVID-19 patients in Latvia;2) the data from standardized analysis of samples from COVID-19 patients for the selected set of biochemical, molecular and immunological markers;3) an open data platform, providing necessary tools to ensure accessibility of all COVID-19 related clinical and analytical data for research and health care practice. The immediate and open access to all resources and data obtained and generated during this project is at the center of the provided approach. To fulfill the open science principles, the–omics data will be deposited in the public data repositories and shared with international COVID-19 initiatives