Shenzhen, March 16, 2020 - China National Genebank (CNGB) announced its strategic partnership with the GISAID Initiative, noted as a key player in global health security for its data-sharing program, enabling near real-time surveillance to respond to and mitigate seasonal and pandemic influenza and now the hCoV-19 pandemic. Comprised of 14,000 collaborating researchers and 1,500 contributing institutions world-wide, GISAID’s unique, sharing mechanism is enabling immediate progress, for example in the understanding of the new COVID-19 disease and in the research and development of candidate medical countermeasures.

The CNGB partnership with GISAID will facilitate access and use of hCoV-19 data for Chinese researchers, and provide a safe data sharing environment where the interests of data submitters are safeguarded, by providing also effective measures for the acknowledgement of laboratories providing viruses or contributing genomic data and IP Rights.

GISAID’s EpiCoV™ database for hCoV-19 data already surpassed conventional platforms, such as the public-domain archives, where access to data takes place anonymously, with no protections of owners’ interests and no transparency on the use of data.