Theiagen Terra Support for CD and State Public Health Labs

Large-scale viral genomic surveys for SARS-CoV-2 can provide important baseline information for national and state-level surveillance, defining important changes in transmission, identifying unusual or emerging variants, and ultimately: improving public health responses and decision-making with better laboratory data. Even so, routine sequencing of viruses can be challenging in many public health laboratories, due to a number of factors, including the complexity of sequencing and bioinformatic workflows, and limited access to timely remnant samples for sequencing and analysis. The Terra platform, developed by the Broad Institute is a secure, scalable platform that is currently used to host data and provide an analysis environment for many projects including the All of Us Research Program, the National Human Genome Research Institute’s ANVIL, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute’s BioDataCatalyst, and the Human Cell ATLAS. Terra includes a digital object catalog for tracking datasets and managing access to them, workspaces to enable aggregation analysis and sharing of data while maintaining a tight security perimeter, scalable analytical engines for both batch processing and exploratory analysis and a variety of focused applications targeting important use cases and user communities. It has a robust operations and support infrastructure which includes threat detection, cost optimizations, regulatory compliance, documentation and user support. As part of a National SARS-CoV-2 sequencing surveillance program, many State Public Health Labs (SPHL) are beginning to sequence the genomes of SARS-CoV-2 in order to survey their communities for emerging variants of concern. Most SPHLs lack the resources and expertise to rapidly analyze and deposit the sequences into the public databases. They need onboarding and training of the Terra platform. This contract will provide support for the SPHLs in the onboarding, training, and use of the Terra Platform for the analysis and deposition of SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences. This platform will allow CDC to collaborate and share results with SPHLs in support of the National SARS-CoV-2 sequencing surveillance program.