GISAID Launches Second Influenza Database

PR Log (Press Release) – Sep 14, 2009 – GISAID’s mission is to facilitate and support data sharing and collaboration by scientists in the global community who use the database to gain a more complete and global understanding of influenza and to develop influenza vaccines, antiviral drugs and diagnostic kits.  

Since May 2008, GISAID has maintained and made available, free of charge, a publicly accessible database for influenza gene sequences, known as the GISAID EpiFlu Database, that has been used by scientists in more than 150 countries to access information and share findings and research (visit: www.gisaid.org/) The GISAID EpiFlu database quickly became a central mechanism in the worldwide effort to combat influenza and has been recognized by the recent World Health Assembly as filling the important public health and scientific goals of transparency and access concerning influenza virus genetic sequence data.  

The new GISAID influenza database was independently developed by the Department of Computational Biology and Applied Algorithmics of the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and a3systems GmbH and is being designed in consultation with the international scientific community.  

Leading veterinary reference laboratories of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Organization for Animal Health, as well as the influenza collaborating centers of the World Health Organization, have uploaded data onto the new GISAID EpiFlu database and are using it to share information.  Indeed WHO collaborating centers are using GISAID’s new database as a tool to make their recommendations for the Southern Hemisphere's 2010 seasonal flu vaccine.

On July 27, 2009, the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), the database administrator originally hired by GISAID, unlawfully de-activated the link on GISAID’s website to the first EpiFlu Database and made it available only on the SIB website.  SIB’s misappropriation of the first Database flagrantly violated numerous provisions of SIB’s Agreement with GISAID; more importantly, SIB’s illegal actions greatly undermined the usefulness of the first EpiFlu Database and threatened the worldwide effort to combat the pandemic H1N1 swine flu, the H5N1 avian flu and seasonal influenza. To re-open the database to the global scientific community, on August 19, 2009, GISAID filed a lawsuit against SIB in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia and initiated an arbitration proceeding in Geneva, Switzerland.

With the launch of GISAID’s new database, which includes new functionality tailored for the international scientific community, the older database that SIB effectively “hijacked” has been rendered obsolete.  As a consequence, the legal proceeding in the United States asking the court to require SIB to restore the link to the first database has been voluntarily withdrawn without prejudice by GISAID.  The arbitration proceeding, however, which also demands that SIB compensate GISAID for SIB’s unlawful conduct, will continue to go forward.