Genomics for global health and pandemic preparedness

The importance of genomic surveillance for infectious diseases to track how changes can influence disease transmission, symptoms, and vaccine and treatment efficacy as seen through the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted that never before has a pathogen received such close attention, with a global effort to monitor viral mutations across more than 12M viral genomes. By comparison, infectious disease surveillance outside of COVID-19 is minimal, and lessons from the pandemic must be applied to other diseases with epidemic or pandemic potential.

A global surveillance system for infectious diseases is now possible as a result of the sequencing infrastructure built during the pandemic. Genomic surveillance of wastewater, environmental sources, and animals, as well as pathogens from patients with unusual disease presentations can provide insights that can help to prevent outbreaks from escalating into pandemics.

Next-generation sequencing (NGS) has several building blocks that can be used at any stage of surveillance, from identifying a completely unknown organism to broad surveillance of potential threats or high-throughput whole genome sequencing of a specific pathogen.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand how the COVID-19 pandemic has evolved and impacted global genomic surveillance
• Identify key learnings from the COVID-19 pandemic that can be applied to future disease surveillance
• Describe the NGS methods available to identify pathogens with pandemic potential and monitor their spread

Darcy Whitlock
Senior Global Product Manager
Illumina

Darcy Whitlock is committed to expanding the use of genomics in infectious diseases and microbiology. Darcy is a senior global product manager at Illumina and is responsible for the COVID-19 portfolio and growth of the infectious disease portfolio. After completing her Masters in molecular biology, Darcy worked at a fertility clinic performing preimplantation genetic testing of embryos. Moving into clinical diagnostic research and development, Darcy focused on the development of clinical diagnostics for infectious and autoimmune gastrointestinal (GI) diseases. She has extensive experience in respiratory disease diagnosis, from both a research and marketing perspective, including the earliest bedside molecular tests for respiratory disease cleared by the US FDA. Darcy joined Illumina in 2021, and is based out of Fort Collins, Colorado.