Workstreams

Partnerships

We have established a broad global and regional network for pathogen genomic surveillance across South and Southeast Asia. Through our strong partnerships we leverage regional expertise from institutions in Singapore, Asia Pacific and beyond. Our partners include universities, genomics surveillance networks, global financing funds and the major next generation sequencing manufacturers in Asia. We know that cross collaboration with our partners and gaining insights from the region is vital for us to achieve our mission. 

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Capacity Development

Our key capacity development programme is the Asia PGI Academy – a training hub for pathogen genomic surveillance. The Academy aims to strengthen laboratory practice, bioinformatics capacity and ‘One Health’ surveillance by providing training to our partners. The Academy site is equipped with wet-lab platforms which provide hands on exposure to the main genomic sequencing platforms used across Asia. The Academy will support cross-country learning, enable tailored country outreach by specialised teams, and facilitate virtual learning platforms. The Academy will also support visiting scientist placements to provide opportunities to undertake cutting-edge research in genomics and tool development. In September 2023, the Academy conducted a week-long training on Viral Whole Genome and Metagenomic Sequencing. Read more about the training.

Enabling Environment

We seek to create an enabling environment to support resource constrained countries in Asia to fully adopt genomics surveillance as a public health tool. This means navigating the regulatory, legal, procurement and supply chain frameworks that can cause bottlenecks for low resource countries. We are working closely with partner countries on national surveillance planning, evidence based policy and cost-benefit analysis of integrating pathogen genomics into public health responses. The Asia PGI Strategy Think Tank has been established to leverage partnerships and convene stakeholders across the region to profile issues relevant to genomic surveillance, discuss challenges and share best practice. 

Monitoring & Research

We have designed and implemented strong mechanisms to monitor progress towards systemic change in genomic surveillance capacity among our Asia PGI partner countries. Initial efforts have focused on conducting a landscape assessment on the status of pathogen genomics capacity across 14 Asian countries. This landscape identified common challenges and informed the development of a regional Roadmap for Pathogen Genomics in Asia to inform on how to best strengthen pathogen genomics for public health impact. Country specific profiles (see Resources) were also curated from the landscape results for a deeper understanding of pathogen genomics surveillance within each country context.