UK develops early warning system for future pandemics – EURACTIV.com

UK researchers are developing a system that could potentially be used to identify emerging variants and act as an early warning system for new diseases and future pandemics.

The researchers, based at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridgeshire, “aim to develop tools to identify new virus threats as part of an early warning system to help prevent future pandemics.

The technology would monitor genetic changes in respiratory viruses as they circulate around the world.

“Britain was at the forefront of genomic surveillance of COVID-19 and was responsible for around 20% of all Sars-CoV-2 genomes that were sequenced across the planet during the pandemic,” said Ewan. Harrison, who leads the project, The Guardian reported.

In the EU, similar efforts are being made.

On March 14, the European Commission’s Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority and the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control agreed to strengthen cooperation and coordinate their work in support of health emergency preparedness and response in the area of ​​medical countermeasures.

The UK team want this system to be used around the world, so they are working to make it cheap, quick and easy to use. “In many labs around the world, people have smaller sequencing machines and can’t sequence as many samples as we can at the Sanger,” said John Sillitoe, head of the Genomics Surveillance Unit at the University. Sanger Institute, The Guardian reported.

“So we want the system to work as well on those machines as it does here on our high-volume devices,” he added.

(Sofia Stuart Leeson | EURACTIV.com)