As COVID-19 continues to spread globally, there has been an urgent need to understand the DNA footprint of this rapidly evolving virus. COVID Cloud, funded under the COVID-19 Program of Canada’s Digital Technology Supercluster (https://www.digitalsupercluster.ca/), brought together Canadian expertise in areas such as genome science, infectious diseases, virology, software engineering, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, pharmaceuticals and policy to accelerate the development of a digital technology platform to provide near real-time monitoring of the virus’ evolutionary strains, transmission patterns, mutation rate and drug targets. 

Led by DNAstack, the thirteen consortium members also included BioSymetrics, McGill’s Centre for Genomics and Policy (CGP), FACIT, Genome BC, Ontario Genomics, McMaster University, Mannin Research, Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR), Microsoft, Roche, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and Vector Institute. The COVID Cloud project harnessed Canada’s genomics research capabilities to rapidly sequence, share and analyze the genomic profile of COVID-19 and the people who have contracted it in Canada and around the world. This information helped inform the development of public health policies, diagnostics, therapies and vaccines. Deployment of the COVID Cloud technology and direct support of the national CanCOGeN VirusSeq project and VirusSeq Data Portal by DNAstack and several other consortium members helped accelerate release of raw virus sequence data and minimal metadata to the scientific and global community as fast as possible, resulting in rapid identification and tracking of Variants of Concern. 

In addition to accelerating the response to COVID-19, the platform will serve as a springboard for further leveraging genomics and precision health in the years to come, including preparing for future waves and outbreaks of other infectious diseases.