The Power of a Network of Networks

The most extensive within this nexus are our data and analytics partners, many of which are scientific centers at the forefront of generating research-based evidence, including entities at the leading edge of applying data science to global health.

Our policy and advocacy partners focus on providing public health guidance while simultaneously mobilizing political and financial commitment among global, regional and national stakeholders.

Our industry and technology partners are leading diagnostic and sequencing manufacturers, accelerating the development and availability of our modern data stack platform, tools and models while facilitating automation and helping build capacity in resource-scarce environments.

Our platform is critical to advancing data driven insights to detect and prevent future pandemics and biorisks by connecting and aggregating signals from publicly available and privately acquired global data sets for analysis.

Working across these three sectors, we are creating collaborations in Asia, Africa, Europe, Middle East, South America and within the United States.

Working with one of our key industry and technology partners Illumina, we were able to facilitate an in-kind contribution of reagent kits that enabled our partners to double their sequencing capacity while simultaneously leading to an almost 50 percent decrease in the time between sample collection and database upload.

This rapidly expanded the representation of India-sourced genomes available through one of our priority data partners, GISAID. The impact of our work via this approach enabled timely tracking of the Delta variant and identification of the first two confirmed cases of the Omicron variant in Bangalorepartners at the National Centre for Biological Sciences.

In Latin America, we are in the process of building a series of global genomic surveillance ecosystem networks for emerging and re-emerging infectious disease discovery, developing partnerships with key international organizations.

In Africa, support to our partner at the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation (CERI) in Stellenbosch, South Africa, helped establish the largest genomic sequencing center on the African continent, focusing on expanding the knowledge base and capability for surveillance across Africa.

The CERI has trained over 100 scientists in 21 African countries to conduct genomic surveillance in their local labs and communities. We are also partnering with the World Health Organization to establish mechanisms and processes for collaboration between the human, animal and environmental health sectors.

Each of these initiatives and others underway present the opportunity to advance programs toward sustainable systems for global health security.

Recognizing that comprehensive data improves lives, we are testing concepts around cloud data systems and analytics layers – such as bioinformatics tools needed to translate wastewater sequences into variant counts – and mobile applications.

With our partners, we are co-creating a modern pandemic surveillance data ecosystem, leveraging a state of the art modern data stack platform that connects disparate data, providing researchers worldwide the ability to survey genomic, syndromic and environmental data for pathogens and variants. The goal of gaining insights from these data is to trigger data-driven actions to prevent outbreaks from becoming a pandemic. If researchers in South Africa had been able to conduct this type of search in 2021, identifying what we now know to be the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2, they would have spotted similar genomes already detected in Europe and the U.S., potentially triggering a faster, more data-driven response.

Continuously expanding our global network of partnerships will build our capability to connect and analyze data and enhance global connectivity to inform decision-making. A world that can connect local data in a global context will ensure a world better prepared to prevent the next pandemic. That is our goal.