The EMB Standards Committee (EMB-SC) is a standing Committee within the EMB Society and recommends standards of engineering practices.

Since the recent outbreak of COVID-19, clinical researchers, drug manufacturers, economists, social scientists, and other experts have sought access to data for analytics. Much of the data resides in disparate networks and within organizational boundaries. It takes considerable time and effort to obtain permission to acquire this data, to gain authorization from ethics committees or institutional review boards (IRBs) to use it, and to transfer it across overstressed networks. Most researchers would prefer to spend the precious time consumed by these rather tedious tasks on analysis. A more efficient approach would be to have a directory that says what data is where and what it contains, and then develop analytics to leverage the data in a way that preserves privacy and minimizes latency.

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IEEE is providing no-cost public access to important IEEE standards, used by technologists, engineers, scientists, manufacturers, as they respond to the global COVID-19 public health emergency. Click “Access Standards” to access and download a PDF of the standards relevant to the global health pandemic.  Several of the standards were developed by the EMB Standards Committee Working Groups. See EMB Published Standards.

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Genome sequencing has enormous potential for personalized medicine, mitigating the next pandemic, and more. But it can’t live up to that potential if researchers don’t have a standardized way to communicate and share genome data analysis methods.

Today, there are dozens of platforms, scripts, and tools for analyzing genome data, used by tens of thousands of researchers worldwide—an abundance that reflects the burgeoning nature of the genomics field. But it also creates barriers to exchanging all of the key information that other researchers, as well as regulators such as the FDA, need to understand the results and replicate the tests.This lack of “information interoperability” undermines their ability to quickly and effectively respond to emerging pandemics such as COVID-19. Even during normal times, it creates unnecessary delays and expenses every step of the way, from drug discovery to treatment delivery.

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