In response to the COVID-19 pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2, CLIMB set up the CLIMB-COVID environment to allow the COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) Consortium to rapidly analyse SARS-CoV-2 genomes for genomic surveillance.
The COG-UK consortium brought together NHS organisations, UK public health agencies, over 20 academic partners across the UK, and dedicated regional sequencing centres including the Quadram Institute Bioscience (QIB) in Norwich. Its aim was to deliver large-scale sequencing combined with clinical information, to inform interventions and policy decisions.
CLIMB-COVID was built within the existing CLIMB infrastructure to provide reproducible data analysis pipelines, computing and storage capacity to the consortium, facilitating data sharing and collaboration between researchers. Once sequence data and associated metadata was uploaded by regional sequencing centres, it was harmonised and passed through continuous integration to public databases.
This let the consortium rapidly investigate cases in hospitals and the community to understand how the virus was spreading and evolving, enabling analysis of over two millions SARS-CoV-2 genomes since inception — supporting outbreak management and vaccine research.
COG-UK closed on 31 March 2023, and CLIMB-COVID has wound down on 31 March 2026. However, the CLIMB infrastructure remains ready for any public health surveillance need — capacity can be scaled rapidly to support a national capability.
For more detail, see the CLIMB-COVID publication.
Running a surveillance programme of your own? See our Surveillance package.