The COVID-19 pandemic clearly demonstrated the value that pathogen sequencing played in developing diagnostics within weeks, vaccines within months, and therapeutics in less than two years. To ensure we don’t backtrack on one of the few positive developments to come out of the pandemic, a pathogen surveillance network launched just last week.
Pathogen genomic surveillance, or PGS, is the ongoing collection, sequencing, and analysis of the genetic code of viruses, bacteria, and other disease-causing pathogens. It is a critical tool for the management of threats to public health. Without the rapid sequencing, analysis, and sharing of the genomic data of COVID-19, we would not have been able to develop vaccines as quickly as we did; neither would we have been able to develop therapeutics that were adapted to successive variants as they emerged.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, countries invested substantial resources in scaling up PGS capacity. At the height of the pandemic, more than 67,000 genomes were being deposited in public viral genome data repositories each day.. COVID-19 is just one of many risks that PGS seeks to address. Globalization, climate change, and antimicrobial resistance will create opportunities for the emergence of new diseases, and new geographies for existing ones. A robust and flexible PGS system is essential to manage these risks.
About the author
Dr. Chikwe Ihekweazu
Dr. Chikwe Ihekweazu is the assistant director general at the World Health Organization for surveillance and health emergency intelligence and leads the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence, based in Berlin, Germany. Previously, Ihekweazu was the first director general of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control. He acted as interim director of the West Africa Regional Centre for Surveillance and Disease Control through 2017. He trained as an infectious disease epidemiologist and has over 25 years of experience working in senior public health and leadership positions in national public health institutes.
