United Kingdom: A new, groundbreaking technology is being developed by British researchers to monitor genetic changes in respiratory viruses as they circulate around the world. The system will be used to spot dangerous new variants as they emerge and act as an early warning system for new diseases and future pandemics.

The team, which is based at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridgeshire, intends to make the technology cheap, easy to use, and capable of being scaled up to provide global surveillance of a wide range of viruses. The major targets include influenza viruses, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), coronaviruses, and previously unknown pathogens.

The ultimate aim of the project, titled “the Respiratory Virus and Microbiome Initiative,” is to create a system that would deploy DNA sequencing technology to identify all viral, bacterial, and fungal species in a single sample collected from a nose swab from a patient.

“Britain was at the leading edge of the genomic surveillance of Covid-19 and was responsible for about 20% of all the Sars-CoV-2 genomes that were sequenced across the planet during the pandemic,” Mr. Ewan Harrison, who is leading the project at the Sanger Institute, a world-leading centre for genetics research and DNA sequencing, remarked.

“The knowledge and data we generated allowed us to track, with unprecedented speed and accuracy, Sars-CoV-2, the virus responsible for Covid-19, and to monitor how it was changing. It was a wonderful aid in helping to fight the disease. Now we are aiming to contribute to building a global genomic surveillance for all respiratory viruses. These, after all, are the agents most likely to trigger new pandemics,” Mr. Harrison added.

The Sanger team is collaborating with the UK Health Security Agency, British academics, and other public health bodies on the project with the aim of developing techniques that will allow them to sequence, from a single sample, not just one virus variant but any that might be infecting a patient.

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