In late 2003, David Lipman, Lone Simonsen, Steven Salzberg, and a consortium of other scientists wrote a proposal to begin sequencing large numbers of influenza viruses at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR).
Key early contributors included Peter Palese of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, Jill Taylor of the Wadsworth Center at the New York State Department of Health, Lance Jennings of Canterbury Health Laboratories (New Zealand), Jeff Taubenberger of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (who later moved to NIH), Richard Slemons of Ohio State University and Rob Webster of St. Jude's Children's Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.
In 2006 the project was joined by Ilaria Capua of the Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale delle Venezie (in Italy), who contributed a valuable collection of avian flu isolates (including multiple H5N1 strains).
[2] Nancy Cox from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Robert Couch from Baylor College of Medicine also joined the project in 2006, contributing over 150 influenza B isolates.
The project began prospective studies of the 2007 influenza season with collaborators Florence Bourgeois and Kenneth Mandl of Children's Hospital Boston and the Harvard School of Public Health and Laurel Edelman of Surveillance Data Inc.[citation needed]