PREVENT

Academic-Community Partnership in San Diego Awarded CDC Grant to Establish Pandemic Preparedness Cohort and Data Hub

A multi-institutional team led by Dr. Louise Laurent, MD/PhD, including investigators at the University of California San Diego, Scripps Research, San Ysidro Health, and The Global ARC, has been awarded a 5-year grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for “PREVENT: Preparedness through Respiratory Virus Epidemiology and Community Engagement,” with $5.7M of funding for Year 1. This groundbreaking project is part of the newly established CHARM (Community and Household Acute Respiratory Illness Monitoring) Network. The CHARM Network will be comprised of three Longitudinal cohorts, two In-depth Immunologic Assessment cohorts, three Household Transmission cohorts, and one Data Hub. By monitoring these cohorts for infection by and immune response to a variety of respiratory viruses, CHARM will generate real-time information on community infection rates and emerging variants, and provide insights into immunologic factors impacting susceptibility to infection and environmental and behavioral factors influencing transmission. This information can be used to guide public health responses and enhance the nation’s readiness and response to respiratory virus outbreaks.

PREVENT will participate in all three cohort types, as well as serve as the CHARM Network’s Data Hub. PREVENT will enroll and retain a diverse longitudinal community cohort of 2,000 individuals, collecting comprehensive data through longitudinal symptom screening, respiratory pathogen testing and sequencing, assessment of humoral and cellular immunity, and case-ascertained tracking of transmission. The other two CHARM sites are the University of Washington, led by Dr. Helen Chu, MD/MPH, and including Longitudinal and Household Transmission cohorts, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center/Massachusetts General Hospital, led by Dr. Kathryn Stephenson, MD/MPH, and including all three cohort types. As the CHARM Data Hub, PREVENT will serve as the central data repository and support protocol development, and data management, analysis, and dissemination. This will include providing public access to data and results on the incidence of the most common respiratory infections in real-time.

The transdisciplinary PREVENT team has expertise in large-scale COVID-19 clinical testing, viral genomic epidemiology, dissemination and implementation science, data and biospecimen management, and community partnership. PREVENT 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. These accomplishments will serve as a strong foundation for the PREVENT initiative, and contribute to the success of the Pandemic Preparedness Network as a whole.