IDDO: FAIR, equitable and sustainable data platform for infectious diseases

During the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers studying the same disease often could not share or compare their data because no common platform existed to connect them. This project tackles a persistent failure in infectious disease research: data sits in isolated silos, locked behind incompatible formats, institutional barriers, or short-term funding. Without a way to find, access, and reuse data across studies, scientists waste time duplicating efforts and miss patterns that could reveal how a disease works or which treatments are effective. The project brings together IDDO and Vivli—two organisations that already manage data for diseases like malaria and tuberculosis—to build a single, interoperable platform that follows FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). If successful, the platform would let a researcher in Brazil, for example, immediately combine clinical trial data from Uganda and Thailand to spot a treatment signal that no single study had the statistical power to detect. The project also develops a business plan to keep the platform running long after grant funding ends—a problem that has killed many previous data-sharing efforts. The impact is not a new drug or vaccine, but the infrastructure that makes discovering them faster and more reliable.