Unlocking the Power of Data: Pioneering Global Health Solutions in TB and Immunology Research
We asked Douaa Mugahid, a pivotal figure in research compliance and data management at the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases (IID), to share insights into her multifaceted role.
Tell us a bit about your role in the department. Why are research compliance and data management critical components in ensuring the success of IID?
My role is rather unusual, in the sense that I wear multiple hats within and beyond the department, but all are related to data management, sharing, and (re-)use. On one hand I am the Data Officer for an international consortium (Hi-IMPAcTB) that involves multiple labs beyond HSPH and on which Sarah Fortune is a lead PI. The consortium generates a large amount of extremely valuable biomedical datasets that are relevant to the tuberculosis (TB) field, but also the immunology and infectious disease fields more broadly. One of our main goals is to make sure all this data is well-curated, properly organized, documented, and shared with the world. By doing that, the hope is that members of the consortium and researchers worldwide can continue to analyze the data in creative ways that improve our understanding of TB and other immune diseases, inform the development of better TB diagnostics, and help identify better vaccine candidates and other clinical interventions long after the funding period ends.
On the other hand, I coordinate a project on which Sarah is also co-PI, that involves multiple departments at HSPH as well as industry collaborators. Large-scale clinical data is at the heart of this project, except it is proprietary and in the custody of a diagnostic company. Unlike with Hi-IMPAcTB, data sharing is strictly regulated to protect patient privacy and the commercial interests of the company and their customers. This limits how the data can be shared and used, which also dictates the scope of our investigation. Nevertheless, it is a great exercise in aligning public and commercial interests with those of public health researchers and practitioners to address important problems such as improving public health monitoring, pandemic prediction, and health system performance. For those who would like to learn more, we wrote about some of that in this piece.
What measures do you take to ensure IID derives maximum value from the data we produce?
I think I implicitly answered the second part of your question, but if I had to summarize, responsible data management, sharing and use in these two widely different contexts advances the national and global public health agenda in different ways.
I try my best to make sure the data in my custody is FAIR, which is an acronym for findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-usable so that researchers who were not involved in the collection of the data can use it appropriately and with confidence. This acronym was coined by the larger research community and there is a lot that goes into this practically including: good sample and reagent tracking, documentation of wet and dry lab work, digital organization, standardization of used vocabularies, etc…
Could you briefly describe your involvement in Sarah Fortune’s Hi-IMPAcTB consortium project. How do the data management operations for this initiative significantly impact the project itself as well as IID as a whole?
I really think internal data sharing has been a strong differentiating factor for Hi-IMPAcTB, a lot of which started before I joined to be honest. In my opinion, it largely explains why its researchers have been so productive, publishing over 30 papers over the span of 5 years in well-read and highly regarded journals. Making sure the data is well-managed allowed them to derive non-intuitive insights about TB biology and disease across a range of species in far less time than it would’ve taken otherwise. It’s exciting that many of these findings are now being corroborated in other labs across the world. Of course, Hi-IMPAcTB’s researchers’ openness, trust, and a genuine interest in interdisciplinary collaboration and advancing their fields has also made this possible. Now that more of this data is available in the public domain, I’m sure researchers in IID and elsewhere will benefit from it and some already have. By bringing their own curiosity and expertise to exploring and analyzing the data, more researchers can now also help advance scientific progress. If people are curious, I encourage them to check out Hi-IMPAcTB’s public datasets, keeping in mind that there’s more to come.
To learn more about Hi-IMPAcTB’s and the work of Douaa Mugahid and the Fortune Lab please check the links below.
