2020 has placed huge demands on everyone as the global community searched for ways to respond to the devastating effects of COVID-19. Many are starting to realise that a COVID-19 vaccine will not be the ultimate panacea we hoped for but "one tool in a toolbox of collective and individual actions that will need to be taken to bring the spread of the virus under control". Within PHA4GE, we view our role as contributing to the toolbox of actions needed to control, not only COVID-19, but to respond to emerging pathogens and future pandemics. The recent re-emergence of Ebola in Guinea is a reminder of the need to strengthen health systems that can deliver a pathogen surveillance platform to inform a rapid public health response. In this newsletter you will find examples of the innovation that members of the data harmonisation working group have undertaken to respond to harmonization of COVID-19 and AMR data. There is an update from the infrastructure working group contextualising Pathogen bioinformatics and the Cloud. After formulating a process for community-based discussion, the Ethics and Data sharing working group shares some of their plans for 2021.
This year we launched a new funding mechanism on the 14th February 2021 that seeks to implement bioinformatics in public health institutions. This funding mechanism will provide practical use cases to strengthen pathogen genomic surveillance in Africa and Asia.
Please join us for the PHA4GE symposium in March 2021 where there will be an exciting line-up of speakers covering implementation of tools to facilitate targeted response to pandemics including COVID-19.
Alan Christoffels
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In the second half of 2020, the PHA4GE Infrastructure Working Group conducted a survey of SARS-CoV-2 sequencing around the globe.
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We have a call for sub-grants to assist work in bioinformatics within Africa and Asia.
We are also excited to host our first ever public meeting PHA4GE: Open Meeting 2021. The meeting will highlight topics some of the Working Groups have been covering such as standardization, antimicrobial resistance (AMR), Training and Workforce Development, Ethics and Data Sharing and presentations from BAOBAB LIMS our partners, Africa CDC.
Stay posted on these events and other news on our Website, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn pages
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Data Structures
Putting data standards into practice: PHA4GE engages organizations around the world
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Ethics and Data Sharing
Developing an online forum for a community of practice in ethics and data sharing
Read More
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The ASM NGS Conference took place between 7 -11 December 2020. On behalf of Broad Institute’s Viral Genomics group, Danny Park prepared a poster presentation titled "Viral-NGS: Cloud Compute for Viral Genomics Using GA4GH Standards". The poster explains how they are able to maximize the portability of their bioinformatic pipelines across different compute environments, and increase its accessibility to researchers.
PHA4GE’s standardized AMR gene detection output specification was also presented at the conference by Inês Mendes titled "hAMRonization: Improving the Utility of Antimicrobial Resistance Gene Prediction Tools Using the PHA4GE AMR Gene Detection Specification".
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We’d like to share some of the other upcoming events in our community.
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PHA4GE:
Open Meeting 2021
30 March 2021
Learn More
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Applied Bioinformatics and Public Health Microbiology
5 - 7 May 2021
Virtual Conference
Learn More
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