Use Cases
How the Pandemic PACT programme supports evidence-informed decision-making
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 grants 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 grant schemes and demonstrate accountability. Cross-linkage of grants within the Tracker to Europe PMC website will enable funders to view the outputs of their investments when research activities are published.
Example from COVID-19
Objective
Inform funding allocation
Use case
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 grants 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 grant 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.
Example from COVID-19
Objective
Identify research gaps and formulate research questions
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 patients, carers and communities.
*ISARIC – The International Severe Acute Respiratory and emerging Infection Consortium is an international 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 will map research grants to specific 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.
Example from COVID-19
Objective
To monitor progress on research roadmaps
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.
Example from COVID-19
Objective
Extract data to supplement database
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.