UC San Diego to lead data hub of CDC-funded pandemic preparedness network

(Press-News.org) The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has selected University of California San Diego as one of three partner institutions to establish a groundbreaking pandemic preparedness initiative, the Community and Household Acute Respiratory Illness Monitoring (CHARM) Network. The new five-year cooperative agreement will help generate information on how respiratory viruses spread and provide insights into factors impacting susceptibility to respiratory illnesses. At UC San Diego, the cooperative agreement supports the $5.7 million project, “PREVENT: Preparedness through Respiratory Virus Epidemiology and Community Engagement” led by Louise Laurent, M.D., Ph.D., professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at UC San Diego School of Medicine and a perinatologist at UC San Diego Health. The project will also include investigators at Scripps Research, San Ysidro Health and The Global ARC.

“Responding to COVID-19 was a real challenge, but programs like the CHARM Network can ensure that we are better equipped to handle future pandemics,” said Laurent, whose previous work with the San Diego-wide SEARCH Alliance, the RADx-UP funded CO-CREATE and CO-CREATE-Ex studies, and UC San Diego’s PREPARE Institute has been instrumental in developing strategies for pandemic preparedness and public health management of respiratory infections. “The substantial and varied accomplishments of the PREVENT team will serve as a strong foundation for the initiative, and it’s an honor for UC San Diego to be able to lead this crucial effort.”

CDC’s newly-established CHARM Network will monitor members of the community for infection by and immune response to a variety of respiratory viruses, gathering vital information that can be used to guide public health responses and help the nation better prepare for respiratory virus outbreaks. The CHARM Network will contain three types of research cohorts, or study populations, which will allow researchers to gain an in-depth understanding of the dynamics of respiratory illnesses. Longitudinal cohorts will track how respiratory illnesses spread over a long span of time; immunological assessment cohorts will look closely at how the immune system responds to respiratory viruses; and household transmission cohorts will study the spread of respiratory diseases through individual households. Two additional CHARM sites will be located in Seattle (led by the University of Washington) and the Greater Boston area (including Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital).

UC San Diego will participate in all three categories of research cohort, enrolling and retaining about 2,000 individuals and collecting comprehensive data about their health. UC San Diego will also serve as the CHARM Network’s centralized data hub, supporting protocol development and data management, analysis and dissemination. This will include ensuring timely access for public health authorities to results on the incidence of the most common respiratory infections.

More about the partnership

UC San Diego is a leading public research university known for its rigorous research programs and strong community engagement. Scripps Research is a world-renowned research institution with a focus on biomedical sciences and translational research. San Ysidro Health is a non-profit organization committed to providing quality health services to the communities of San Diego County. The Global ARC (Global Action Research Center) is a social change organization that works to connect grassroots organizing to policy makers and researchers.

The transdisciplinary team at UC San Diego has expertise in large-scale COVID-19 clinical testing, viral genomic epidemiology, dissemination and implementation science, data and biospecimen management, and community partnership. UC San Diego investigators bring a wealth of experience from previous projects that have traced the spread of COVID-19 variants within health systems locally, nationally and internationally, and have developed, implemented and refined innovative approaches to increase community access to COVID-19 testing and vaccination.

UC San Diego team members include: Maryann Betty, Carrie Byington, Aaron Carlin, Rebecca Fielding-Miller, Marni Jacobs, Kristen Jepsen, Rob Knight, Niema Moshiri, Borsika Rabin, Marva Seifert, Nicole Stadnick, Ilya Zaslavsky, and Jingjing Zou at UC San Diego; Kristian Andersen and Karthik Gangavarapu at Scripps Research; Jeannette Aldous and Edgar Diaz-Pardo at San Ysidro Health; and Paul Watson at The Global Action Research Center.

The title of the cooperative agreement, awarded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is “PREVENT: Preparedness through Respiratory Virus Epidemiology and Community Engagement,” (U01IP001238).

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