Table 1 COVID-19 relevant practice and ongoing priorities linked to the GloPID-R Frontiers meeting recommendations

1.

Research cohorts are valuable tools for building pandemic research responses.

Several cohorts including UK Biobank and a DHSS in Mozambique have already pivoted or enhanced for COVID-19. Further consideration needs to be given by funders and researchers to relevant cohorts for COVID-19 research. Newly created cohorts are being funded and need to be designed in a way in which they can evolve to address future research questions.

2.

Research capacity and activity mapping are essential to facilitate collaboration and improve targeting of resources.

For COVID-19, GloPID-R has collaborated with the UK Collaborative on Development Research to strengthen research mapping through the ‘COVID-19 Research Project Tracker’ [4], a live database of funded research projects on COVID-19 mapped to the WHO Research Roadmap for COVID-19. Several other research trackers have been established focusing on clinical research.

3.

Research collaboration especially between clinical trial networks and cohorts are essential to improve research outcomes.

Collaboration between cohorts and clinical trial networks is already evident through initiatives such as PREPARE, ALERRT, Pandora-ID-NET, ISARIC and other networks and was further facilitated by networking at the meeting, much of which is now enabling rapid research in the COVID-19 pandemic.

4.

Sustainability of funding and research capacity during inter-epidemic periods is key to ensure quality research can be initiated rapidly for epidemics and pandemics.

The COVID-19 pandemic has already shown the benefits of pre-established studies, coordination of study prioritisation and active studies, ready to recruit at the outset of an outbreak. This was the case for the RECOVERY trial and CoCIN cohort in the UK.

5.

Rapid research and research funding systems and rapid data sharing are needed to facilitate knowledge generation to improve practice within epidemics and pandemics.

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in greater rapid data sharing than seen before, enabling accelerated knowledge, but also highlighting the potential risks from the multitude of non-reviewed papers. This makes the GloPID-R data sharing principles of ethical, accessible, transparent, equitable, fair and quality [5] important to highlight again to guide ongoing activities and for funders to implement the GloPID-R data sharing roadmap recommendations to improve processes.

6.

Ethics and social science need to be core to broader epidemic pandemic and research response activities.

For COVID-19, we have certainly seen greater inclusion of ethics and social science than in any previous epidemic, and indeed, these have formed two of the priorities for the WHO ‘Coordinated Global Research Roadmap for COVID-19’ [6]. Research is needed to evaluate the implementation of social science research into practice, building the bridge between science and implementation through moving away from traditional silo working towards integrated, multidisciplinary practice, including social scientists, health promotion, public health and clinical practitioners.