ARBOGEN: an inter-territorial program to track arbovirus epidemics — and the contribution of Natural Solutions in data engineering
The growing burden of dengue, chikungunya and other arbovirus epidemics has become a major public health challenge. Their increasing presence in Europe, their massive spread in tropical regions and the diversity of circulating viral lineages require a coordinated and ambitious scientific response.
To address this, the ARBOGEN program — supported by the MSDAVENIR foundation and coordinated by ANRS-MIE — brings together the expertise of INSERM, IRD, Pasteur Institutes (French Guyana, New-Caledonia, Paris), hospital centers, universities and the Arbo-France network. This national initiative unites virologists, entomologists, clinicians and data specialists across mainland France and overseas territories to improve our understanding of viral evolution and host-pathogen interactions.
For the past two years, Natural Solutions has contributed to this effort by providing a set of essential, often invisible but strategically critical skills:
expertise in data acquisition, structuring, normalization, quality control and the development of modular analysis tools that allow research teams to work coherently and reproducibly across the consortium.
These technical foundations are indispensable for a program of this scale.
1. Understanding the genetic diversity of arboviruses
Research partners generate large quantities of viral genome sequences to track lineage evolution, identify emerging variants and investigate transmission dynamics.
Natural Solutions intervenes throughout the data processing chain to ensure that these analyses rely on consistent and well-structured inputs:
standardized data formats,
automated quality control,
integration of robust metadata,
modular analysis tools enabling comparable, reproducible and well-documented workflows.
2. A national platform designed for scientific research
A core ambition of ARBOGEN is to provide an infrastructure capable of hosting and managing high-quality data over the long term.
The platform is accessible here:
https://arbogen.emergen-data.fr
Natural Solutions supports this mission by designing and maintaining:
robust pipelines for data integration and harmonization,
modular analytical tools tailored to the needs of participating laboratories,
verification and traceability mechanisms that guarantee scientific reliability,
an architecture flexible enough to incorporate heterogeneous datasets without compromising coherence.
In short, we ensure that researchers can rely on a solid, consistent and usable data foundation, which is indispensable for generating comparable and robust results within a national consortium.
Conclusion
ARBOGEN represents a major step forward for arbovirus research in France.
By bringing together leading scientific teams and relying on a rigorous data infrastructure, the program strengthens our capacity to track and anticipate emerging epidemics.
Natural Solutions is proud to contribute its expertise in bioinformatics and data engineering to a project that, every day, advances our understanding of viruses responsible for millions of infections worldwide.
