Wellcome Trust partners with Sage Bionetworks

Data re-use can generate new insights that in turn lead to vital health benefits. To stimulate and celebrate the innovative re-use of data, the Wellcome Trust launched the Wellcome Data Re-use Prizes. With the support of Sage Bionetworks and its Synapse platform, the Wellcome Data Re-use Prizes presented two awards, each based on a topic of strategic importance to Wellcome: AMR surveillance and malaria.

Winners of this year’s prizes (source: Wellcome Trust)

AMR surveillance

Antimicrobial resistance is one of the major public health concerns of this century. Entrants focused on the AMR Register, an open data resource launched by Wellcome’s Drug-resistant Infections programme and led by the Open Data Institute. The register has collected information from AMR surveillance programmes generated by the pharmaceutical industry.

The winning entry is Antibiotic Resistance: Interdisciplinary Action (AR:IA) (opens in a new tab). The team developed an interactive web app that lets users quickly visualise resistance rates to antibiotics for common infections and countries of interest. The data on the platform will help doctors to prescribe more appropriately in the face of local drug-resistance.

The winner and runners up were announced at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (opens in a new tab).

See all the entries in this category (opens in a new tab).

Malaria

The World Health Organization (WHO) considers nearly half the world’s population is at risk from malaria. In 2016 there were an estimated 216 million new cases and 445,000 deaths, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa.

Entrants focused on the Malaria Atlas Project, a Repository of Open Access Data (ROAD-MAP), launched with support from a Wellcome Biomedical Resources grant, and then funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The repository contains a wealth of data on malaria risk and intervention coverage – all of which is free to be accessed, re-analysed and re-used by anyone.

The winning entry is Rethinking the Causal Relationship between Malaria and Anaemia for African Children (opens in a new tab). The team’s findings suggest anaemia is not enough to help us fully understand malaria prevalence in communities. They applied a novel approach to analysing the available data and their method could be used to help identify other factors at play.

The winners and runners up will be attending the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Malaria Centre’s ‘Eliminating Malaria: evidence, impact, and policy’ event (opens in a new tab).

See all the entries in this category (opens in a new tab).