Conquering the viral frontier through regional cooperation

I learnt a new term today - “next generation sequencing (NGS) of viruses”, the study of the viruses’ genetic make-up. The knowledge gained from NGS helps us find new viruses, keep track of different versions of the virus, study how outbreaks happen, and understand how viruses spread globally. Keeping track of infectious diseases in the Asian region is important, as it is particularly prone to outbreaks, even in today’s day and age. Among the reasons cited in a journal paper I read are high rates of mobility, high population density, abundant wildlife with frequent human-animal interaction, climate stress and a rapidly changing environment.

The Duke-NUS Centre for Outbreak Preparedness (COP), together with the Programme in Emerging Infectious Disease (EID) and other Singapore and regional partners conducted a 13-country study across Asia of pathogen NGS capacity and developed a regional roadmap that will form the foundation for national genomics policies. The study partners form the Asia Pathogen Genomics Initiative (Asia PGI), for which the secretariat is based at COP. The roadmap provides recommendations which cover a range of topics, from sustainable financing to improving local capacity to cross-country sharing of information.

Asia PGI also set up the Asia PGI Academy in 2023, which aims to train 100 professionals from 15 Asian countries each year in laboratory and bioinformatics, the discipline of understanding genomic data with various methods and tools. The goal is to provide Academy graduates with new skills to detect diseases early, to actively spot and manage diseases in communities.

Another Asia PGI initiative, thanks to a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is a wastewater pathogen surveillance programme. It aims to mitigate large-scale community/public health risks of infectious disease spread in the early stages. In my humble opinion, these efforts are proof that Singapore is contributing to supporting Asia to face the challenge of managing future disease outbreaks.

* This roadmap is an overview of the status for pathogen genomic surveillance across 13 countries in South and Southeast Asia: Bangladesh, Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam.