Credit: NIH
by Michelle Taylor, Editor-in-Chief
The first confirmed case of SARS-CoV-2 occurred around December 1, 2019. From there, it took about 42 days for the SARS-CoV-2 viral genome sequence to be publicly released, and another month for the first 90 initial test kits to be given to high-risk individuals. Over the course of the next 6 to 8 months, the U.S. was able to produce approximately 800,000 tests per day—when the estimated need was 6 million per day.
To say the world was not ready for a global pandemic in 2020 would be an understatement. While the world was eventually able to get COVID-19 under control, it was obvious better planning was needed in the case of another—likely—pandemic. In 2021, the White House launched a $65.3 billion plan to transform the way the United States responds to pandemics in part by vastly accelerating vaccine development, testing and production.
And while vaccines are certainly a critical part of the plan, Azeem Siddique, director of research & development at Jumpcode Genomics, says there’s more to it.
“What is necessary to enable the proposed vision of pandemic preparedness is testing and response strategies that are deployable at day zero to combat any future pathogen outbreak before it progresses to a pandemic,” said Siddique. “Such an approach, by necessity, needs to be pathogen agnostic and, ideally, would provide more detailed information about an individual’s condition than the mere presence of a pathogen.”
Siddique believes next-generation sequencing (NGS) can fulfill those requirements—with some adaptation.
In a paper published in Cell Reports Methods, scientists from Jumpcode Genomics and The Translational Genomics Research Institute describe the development of a CRISPR-enhanced metagenomic NGS test to improve pandemic preparedness.
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