The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), https://www.va.gov Department of Energy (DOE) https://www.energy.gov, and HHS https://www.hhs.gov have formed the COVID-19 Insights Partnership. This initiative will coordinate and share health data as well as research to aid in the fight against COVID-19.
The Partnership will create a framework for VA and HHS to use DOE’s High Performance Computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence resources to conduct COVID-19 research and to analyze health data that would otherwise not be possible.
The Leadership Computing Facility, at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/summit operates with the fastest supercomputer called SUMMIT which accelerates COVID-19 research. This is accomplished by using the computer to run large scale and complex analyses on a vast amount of health data.
SUMMIT’s unmatched capacity to analyze massive integrated datasets will help researchers identify and advance potential treatments and enhanced outcomes for COVID-19 patients with unprecedented speed. By analyzing lung fluid cells from COVID-19 patients conducted on ORNL’s SUMMIT supercomputer, researchers were able to analyze genes from cells in the lung fluid of nine COVID-19 patients
The computational analyses suggests that genes related to one of the body’s systems responsible for lowering blood pressure appears to excessively turn on in the lung fluid cells of those with the virus, These results were published in eLife https://elifesciences.org.
In general, research and analysis conducted by the COVID-19 Insights Partnership will focus on vaccine and therapeutic development and outcomes, virology, and other critical scientific topics to better understand COVID-19. HHS and the VA will provide additional updates and information on research projects as they become available.