In the past three months, so many voices have come together to express human unity in the fight against COVID-19. It is apparent that we indeed, are all in this together. Within the global scientific community, researchers and healthcare workers have been sharing data and resources to understand how the virus is moving in the population, how it changes, and how our immune system responds.

Like most data, genomic information becomes even more valuable when standardized and shared. I’m so proud to announce that we have released the SARS-CoV-2 Data Toolkit so the global community can streamline and share their rapidly evolving work to combat the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak.

The new toolkit is compatible with many Illumina workflows and empowers researchers to securely stream data directly off of Illumina’s full portfolio of sequencers into BaseSpace Sequence Hub for rapid, comprehensive analysis using the DRAGEN RNA Pathogen Detection App. Once analysis is complete, researchers can submit their data to public databases directly from BaseSpace Sequence Hub.

The Illumina SARS-CoV-2 NGS Data Toolkit is releasing new and updated DRAGEN functionality, leveraging the speed and accuracy of DRAGEN to accelerate infectious disease surveillance and outbreak response. The toolkit includes:

• New DRAGEN RNA Pathogen Detection Pipeline to enable detection of infectious diseases and the DRAGEN Metagenomics Pipeline for outbreak surveillance
• SRA Import App
• New GISAID Sharing App

The SARS-CoV-2 Data Toolkit makes it simpler for researchers to rapidly detect and identify viral sequence, and then contribute their findings to critical public resources free of charge on Illumina’s Base Space Sequence Hub. Direct integration with Illumina’s full suite of sequencers will allow researchers to contribute analyzed data sequences to central resources, enabling more rapid and thorough outbreak surveillance and other epidemiological analyses. With data as the common language across Illumina’s global technology platforms, genomic researchers in the fight against COVID-19 and future outbreaks can now share information like never before.