Use Cases
Explore how the Pandemic PACT programme supports the work of funders, researchers, policy makers and data aggregators.
Introduction
Pandemic PACT aims to support evidence-informed decision-making by a global audience of research funders, researchers, policymakers, and further aggregators of data. The Pandemic PACT Grant Tracker is a dynamic, publicly available database and dashboard which enables decision-makers to interrogate the active research landscape at the outset of research activity. Research activities within the tracker are aligned to global research and policy roadmaps to further guide research prioritisation and effective allocation of resources. The Pandemic PACT Rapid Research Needs Appraisal platform provides evidence on aligned knowledge and evidence gaps for which research is needed.
Users can interact with the Pandemic PACT data to monitor and analyse research funding for diseases with pandemic potential, identify research gaps and enhance decision-making for prioritising and coordinating limited research funds in emergencies. We highlight here use-case examples including from the programme’s predecessor, the COVID CIRCLE initiative, which tracked research investments specific to the COVID-19 pandemic and supported evidence-informed decision-making during the pandemic. Users can customise the broad objectives described here to achieve their specific research and policy goals.
Funders
Description
The Pandemic PACT Grant Tracker categorises funded awards by disease groups, pathogen families, study types, study subjects and their characteristics etc., and extracts standardised details of the awarded amounts, the funding organisations, research organisations and investigators. The distribution of funding (by numbers of grants or known financial commitments in USD) categorised by these fields can provide information on potential research gaps when making research funding decisions for pandemic preparedness or during acute response to an outbreak. Specific search filters for diseases and research locations, for instance, can be used to determine research areas with fewer or saturated financial commitment. Funders can also use the tracker to identify opportunities for collaboration and coordination of funding with other funders, set up new award schemes and demonstrate accountability. Cross-linkage of awards within the Tracker to Europe PMC website enables funders to view the outputs of their investments when research activities are published.
Objective
Support informed funding allocation and coordination for epidemic and pandemic response.
Pandemic PACT Examples
Use case
Pandemic PACT supports the alignment of awards to outbreak specific research priorities to provide visibility of the landscape of funding and potential research gaps. One way in which it has done this is by providing rapid, reliable analyses for GloPID-R members during emerging outbreaks to enable coordinated funding actions. For example, insights from Pandemic PACT outbreak analyses supported GloPID-R member’s funding panels’ decisions during the 2024 mpox and H5N1 outbreaks.
Use case
Analyses of global research funding cuts undertaken by the Pandemic PACT team using the grant funding data from our publicly available database examines how changes in budgets impact priority research areas. These insights are informing discussions in GloPID-R Research Funding Contraction Working Group which aims to support coordination among GloPID-R members on policy and practice in response to planned and ongoing global research funding contraction, where improved collaboration can support shared learning and collective action. A key output of this work is a peer reviewed manuscript (under review) examining US funder contributions to pandemic and epidemic research and highlighting potential implications of US research funding cuts for global health security.
Example from COVID-19
The COVID CIRCLE Research Project Tracker and its corresponding quarterly living mapping review, aligned to the WHO COVID-19 Research Roadmap, consistently identified gaps and informed the prioritisation of COVID-19 research awards for context-specific research including in low-and-middle income countries. This impact was highlighted in the WHO COVID-19 research and innovation achievements report which recognised the Tracker as ‘instrumental in reaching global funding decisions’ during the pandemic.
Researchers
Description
The Pandemic PACT Grant Tracker extracts key information including investigator details, funder(s) and funding source(s), and research priority areas of particular interest to researchers and funders such as gender, digital health, innovation and data management and data sharing. Full award abstracts with this key information may be accessed and downloaded from the Tracker to review the current scope of funded research on epidemic-prone diseases, identify research gaps and identify potential collaborators or funders with similar interests.
Objective
Identify emerging research gaps, align research with current funding landscape, and connect with relevant collaborators.
Pandemic PACT Examples
Use case
The names of PIs leading research awards were launched on the PACT dashboard in 2025. Institutional affiliations and other key data support the identification of potential collaborators who are active in particular research fields. This has enabled researchers to easily identify potential collaborators across disciplines and regions and to propose collaboration opportunities to funders and other research groups. This transparency mechanism facilitates more global projects and communication.
Use case
Insights from the Pandemic PACT funding data are published in a six-monthly Living Mapping Review (LMR) providing a regularly updated overview of the research funding landscape for epidemic and pandemic -prone diseases. Researchers can use these findings to identify emerging research gaps and new research questions or research areas for further investigation.
Example from COVID-19
Use case
The UKCDR and GloPID-R COVID-19 Research Project Tracker provided underlying data for mapping and refining the research priorities for Long COVID Research inputting into a forum (co-led by researchers in ISARIC*, GloPID-R funders and the long COVID Support group**) to understand the pathogenesis and impacts of persistent illness in COVID-19 patients, carers and communities.
*ISARIC – The International Severe Acute Respiratory and emerging Infection Consortium is an international federation of clinical trial networks
**Long COVID Support Group is a registered charity in England and Wales, formed by a group of people struggling to recover from COVID-19.
Policymakers
Description
The Pandemic PACT Grant Tracker has mapped research grants to specific research and policy roadmaps (e.g. the 100 days mission) and disease-specific research agenda. Periodic analyses of these data can provide insights into the progress and implementation of policy roadmaps while identifying areas requiring further attention. Regional and national health agencies can avoid fragmentation and/or duplication of efforts through comparative analyses of their respective research areas of interest based on the research categories in the Grant Tracker.
Additionally, the Rapid Research Needs Appraisals project in the Pandemic PACT programme has developed a new rapid, robust methodology to systematically identify existing evidence across pre-defined domains., This supports the identification of gaps in the evidence-base to inform research prioritisation and coordination of policymakers.
Objective
Monitor alignment of research investments with research and policy roadmaps.
Pandemic PACT Examples
Use Case
To facilitate the tracking of grant funding progress and the identification of research gaps, the Pandemic PACT programme is collaborating with the WHO Hub to monitor investments in research on Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence. In 2024, The WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence published a technical brief, in which they identified 23 ranked research priorities, categorised under three pillars: Better Data; Better Analytics; and Better Decisions, and aligned to eight themes, for enhancing public health responses to pandemics and epidemics. The alignment of awards is visualised on a live interactive dashboard providing an overview of the landscape of funded research aligned to the research priority themes.
Use case
In 2025, Pandemic PACT’s Rapid Research Needs Appraisals activities on Middle East Respiratory Virus (MERS) involved collaborating with the WHO to identify evidence gaps related to zoonotic spillover risks, prevention and control measures, and implementation challenges. Outputs of this work include a peer-reviewed manuscript (under review), presentations to WHO and MERS expert groups, and a webinar for the MERS HIVE network.
Example from COVID-19
Use case
Mapping ongoing research activities to global research frameworks and roadmaps provided an opportunity to evaluate the application of such roadmaps to emergency research needs. Mapping grants captured in the UKCDR and GloPID-R Research Project Tracker to the UN Research Roadmap for COVID -19 Recovery showed a wide investment in social sciences and health systems projects which were of particular relevance to the COVID-19 Recovery Agenda.
Data Aggregators
Description
The data that feeds the Pandemic PACT Grant Tracker are structured and standardised based on the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) principles. This means that the dataset and accompanying metadata can be readily retrieved by both humans and machines to link and supplement other databases.
Objective
Support data aggregators’ analyses and integration into external data systems.
Pandemic PACT Examples
Use Case
Pandemic PACT data contributed to the International Pandemic Preparedness Secretariat’s (IPPS) regular updates on the landscape of diagnostics, therapeutics and Vaccines and other health products during the 2024 mpox outbreak. IPPS is a time-limited and independent entity supporting the delivery of the 100 Days Mission. Pandemic PACT data were aggregated with other datasets to provide as comprehensive a view as possible of global research and product development investments during the first 100 days following the declaration of mpox as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), as well as at the 200‑day milestone. Pandemic PACT data informed analyses from day 45 of the PHEIC declaration onwards.
Use case
Awards from the Pandemic PACT Tracker are linked to resulting journal publications via an API with Europe Pubmed Central (PMC) supporting data aggregation, interoperability, and reuse across data systems. This integration of our dataset with Europe PMC enables automated linkage between awards on epidemic- and pandemic prone-disease research and associated research outputs, improving the visibility of downstream publications.
Example from COVID-19
Use case
The COVID CIRCLE Research Project Tracker has fed into complementary analyses to other databases such as the OECD Fundstat Database in understanding the funding landscape for COVID-19 research. The OECD Fundstat Database, which measures governments R &D for COVID-19 research, applied language models to the COVID-CIRCLE database to compare funding estimates between both databases and validate machine-based topic models against expert-extracted WHO priority topics.