ARBOGEN: Building the Data Infrastructure to Better Track Arbovirus Outbreaks

Dengue, chikungunya and other arboviral diseases are becoming an increasingly significant global public health challenge. As these viruses expand their presence in Europe, continue to circulate widely across tropical regions, and evolve into new genetic variants, understanding and anticipating outbreaks requires coordinated scientific efforts — and reliable data.

This is the ambition behind ARBOGEN, a programme supported by the MSDAVENIR Foundation and coordinated by ANRS-MIE.

ARBOGEN brings together expertise from Inserm, IRD, the Institut Pasteur network in French Guiana, New Caledonia and Paris, hospitals, universities and the Arbo-France network. Virologists, entomologists, clinicians and data specialists from mainland France and overseas territories work together to better understand how these viruses evolve, spread and interact with their hosts.

For the past two years, Natural Solutions has been contributing to this collective effort in close collaboration with Aix-Marseille University, Inserm and ANRS-MIE, through its partnership with UMS Emergen and its involvement in the Emergen 2.0 project.

Our role focuses on a critical part of modern scientific research: turning complex, heterogeneous biological data into reliable, structured and reusable information.

From data acquisition and standardisation to quality control and modular analysis tools, we help build the technical foundations researchers need to analyse data consistently and reproducibly across teams and territories.

These foundations may largely operate behind the scenes, but they are essential to making a scientific consortium of this scale work.

From viral genomes to reliable, comparable data

ARBOGEN’s scientific partners are sequencing large numbers of dengue, chikungunya and other arbovirus genomes. These genomic data help researchers track viral lineages worldwide, understand how they evolve and identify emerging variants.

But sequencing is only the beginning.

Before genomic data can be compared and analysed at scale, they need to be structured, documented, checked and harmonised.

This is where Natural Solutions contributes to the data workflow, with:

• standardised input formats that make datasets easier to integrate and compare;

• automated quality-control processes;

• consistent and structured metadata;

• modular analysis tools that allow researchers to run documented and reproducible workflows.

The objective is simple: make sure that data produced by different teams can be confidently used together.

Building a national data platform for arbovirus research

A central ambition of ARBOGEN is to provide the scientific community with a reliable, standardised and sustainable data infrastructure.

The ARBOGEN platform is available at:
https://arbogen.emergen-data.fr

Natural Solutions contributes to this infrastructure by developing robust data pipelines for integrating and harmonising information from multiple sources, alongside flexible analytical tools that can be adapted to the needs of different laboratories.

We also implement verification and traceability mechanisms designed to maintain data quality throughout the workflow, as well as an architecture capable of handling heterogeneous datasets while preserving their consistency.

The challenge is not simply to store more data. It is to make that data reliable, interoperable and ready for scientific analysis.

By providing a shared technical foundation, the platform enables research teams across the consortium to work with comparable datasets and reproducible methods.

Data engineering as a foundation for collaborative science

ARBOGEN illustrates how closely biological research and data engineering are now connected.

Monitoring emerging viruses requires advanced sequencing and scientific expertise, but it also depends on the ability to organise increasingly large and complex datasets, maintain their quality and make them usable across institutions and disciplines.

By bringing together leading scientific teams and a robust shared data infrastructure, ARBOGEN strengthens France’s capacity to monitor arboviruses and better anticipate future outbreaks.

Natural Solutions is proud to contribute its expertise in bioinformatics and data engineering to this collective effort — helping transform complex biological data into reliable scientific resources that support a better understanding of viruses affecting millions of people worldwide.