High costs of genomic sequencing are holding back roughly one third of the countries in the world from genomic sequencing COVID-19, a method which helps identify new variants of the virus, said Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, chief scientist at the World Health Organization, during Devex’s Prescription for Progress event Tuesday.
Why South Africa keeps detecting COVID-19 variants like omicron
The discovery of the omicron variant in South Africa and Botswana has highlighted the genomic sequencing capabilities of South Africa — where scientists also discovered the beta variant in 2020.
Europe is, by far, the largest contributor of sequences globally, she said, whereas there are large gaps in capacity across the African continent — with many of the sequences coming from only a few countries — as well as parts of Latin America.
While this number has increased — at the beginning of the pandemic, less than half of WHO’s member states had the capacity — the current levels are “not good enough,” she said, calling for increased capacity in low- and middle-income countries.
High costs: The cost of the equipment, which needs expensive reagents, which often have to be imported, has prevented countries from developing this expertise.
“Governments are unable, or unwilling, to support and fund ongoing genomic surveillance of many pathogens, because it does require financial investment,” she said.
The private sector has worked to lower costs, including developing smaller, portable sequencing machines. But there are still questions around making reagents more accessible, as well as increasing the human resource capacity to run the machines and analyze the results.
There are a series of partnerships working to expand access, such as the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence, the WHO BioHub System in Switzerland, as well as efforts by The Rockefeller Foundation, Wellcome, the United Kingdom’s government, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, she said.
Beyond COVID-19: The benefits of building this capacity also include tracking influenza variants, identifying the source of food contamination outbreaks, and tracking antimicrobial resistance.
“It's a technology that we want to use more and more in the future. And we need to come together now to see that this can happen, but in a coordinated manner,” she said.