This site supports a community curation effort to annotate immune signatures related to COVID-19 from published literature. Individuals with basic knowledge of immune system mechanisms and terminology, particularly at the undergraduate, graduate, or post-doctoral level are encouraged to participate.

Project Description

This effort aims to collect and summarize findings from published COVID-19 research, such as the relationship between specific immunologic assessments and severity of illness in hospitalized patients with COVID‐19, controlling for time of illness onset, and concurrent participation in clinical trials or off‐label use of investigational (or approved) therapeutic agents for COVID‐19. This information will be culled from the literature, will be annotated using consistent terminology, and will be made available in a standardized format termed “immune signatures”. The signatures collected will provide an important source of prior knowledge to guide the analysis of SARS-CoV-2 responses.

The project is funded by the Human Immunology Project Consortium (HIPC), a multi-institutional program supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases as part of its overall focus on human immunology. The curated signatures will also be used in a related study, the Immunophenotyping Assessment in a COVID-19 Cohort (IMPACC).

All signatures generated by the project will be added to the public HIPC Dashboard website. The Dashboard provides a web infrastructure for browsing and searching a growing collection of immune signatures assembled by the HIPC , representing findings from a wide range of human immunology studies.

The Curation Process

The site provides a list of papers that have been selected for curation.   Curation involves careful examination of the papers to identify immune signatures, and to copy the signature elements and certain well-defined metadata into an annotated spreadsheet with columns corresponding to components of a standardized immune signature data model. The minimize errors and to improve annotation accuracy, manuscript curation is structured as a two-step process, involving an initial annotation followed by a separate review, each step performed by a different volunteer curator. The review process is expected to involve communications between the initial curator and the reviewer, to address possible issues and to arrive to a final, reconciled curation spreadsheet. That spreadsheet is then handed off to the data submission team of the HIPC Dashboard for final quality control, formatting, and upload to the Dashboard web site.

Using the Site

This site:

• provides documentation about immune signature annotation (with example spreadsheets)
• provides user forums to ask and answer questions
• supports the curation workflow by allowing selection of manuscripts to curate/review

The primary goal is to serve as a community knowledge resource for volunteers, to expedite acquisition of the skills necessary for contributing to the curation process.