Opportunities for global collaboration in pathogen genomics

So I think there is a massive opportunity now for pathogen genomics in the coming decades. The COVID-19 pandemic has taught us the absolute importance of a worldwide surveillance system for pathogens. Hopefully, this will continue to be built on over the next few years. There will be a quality in pathogen sequencing globally. There will be systems that will be built to share that data in an equitable way, to allow scientists who generate the data to be acknowledged, but also, that the data can be shared and used by others. I think moving into the next five years or so, I expect we’ll be seeing the same approach being used for pandemic influenza, for other viruses, for tracking antimicrobial resistance and bacterial pathogens.

So I think there’s a really great opportunity for pathogen genomics to really make a difference in the next coming decades.