Since its emergence in China, SARS-CoV-2 has spread worldwide, challenging our health care systems, economies, and societies at an unprecedented scale. Next-generation sequencing (NGS) has played a crucial role in the fight against the pandemic. As of today, global databases contain over 3 million SARS-CoV-2 genome submissions, representing one of the largest public health collaborations in infectious disease genomics, cementing NGS as an essential tool in outbreak management and future preparedness for pandemic threats.

Illumina hybrid-capture and amplicon based end-to-end NGS workflows with streamlined variant calling have been deployed in both centralized sequencing ‘hubs’ as well as de-centralized sites enabling low, middle and high-income countries to participate in the global response. Current workflows are applied for sequencing clinical samples, but novel emerging applications critical to the pandemic response incorporate NGS based approaches, such as wastewater-based population monitoring or host-response profiling to predict potential disease outcome.

In this webinar you will learn:

• How genomic surveillance is being used to fight the pandemic 
• An overview of Illumina’s evolving infectious disease genomics and informatics solutions 
• How a global network of genomics based surveillance can help protect the world from the next pandemic and antimicrobial resistance