Strengthening the Genomic Surveillance Ecosystem: Guiding Principles To Harness India’s Genomic Potential

About the Report

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, more variants of SARS-CoV-2 will emerge, and each may have the potential to further disrupt public health systems and slow progress to end the pandemic. There is an emerging global consensus that continuous pathogen surveillance and robust genomic sequencing is vital to our understanding of the trajectory of this pandemic and will also lay the groundwork for preventing future ones.

India recognized the critical need for enhanced surveillance early in the pandemic. With efforts underway to strengthen and update capacity and infrastructure for public heath for disease surveillance, there is a tremendous opportunity to leverage new technologies and scientific approaches to leapfrog to a data-driven outbreak prediction and prevention system of the future.

This report, “Strengthening the genomic surveillance ecosystem for India,” supported by The Rockefeller Foundation, summarizes recommendations from leading Indian scientists and public health thought leaders, and identified  four  guiding principles that are the foundation of that future system: integrating and scaling sequencing as a component of disease surveillance, integrated genomic analysis into broader bioinformatics, building a data system that fosters innovations in data science for forecasting or predicting disease outbreaks, and facilitating responsible data sharing to democratize scientific inquiry while building trust.