UK launches a real-time surveillance system to prevent a new pandemic: This is how it works

The pandemic hit the United Kingdom very hard, a country that changed its policy to fight the spread of the coronavirus several times. For that reason, the administration has been devising the perfect way to combat the next pandemic. A public-private partnership in the UK is building what the government claims is “the world’s first real-time surveillance system” to track and prevent future pandemics. The program, in which the government and the National Health Service will work with technology from the genomic sequencing company Oxford Nanopore, aims to identify respiratory infections and propose treatments […]

The pandemic hit the United Kingdom very hard, a country that changed its policy to fight the spread of the coronavirus several times. For that reason, the administration has been devising the perfect way to combat the next pandemic.

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A public-private partnership in the United Kingdom is building what the government claims is “the world’s first real-time surveillance system” to track and prevent future pandemics.

The program, in which the government and the National Health Service will work with technology from the genomic sequencing company Oxford Nanopore, aims to identify respiratory infections and propose treatments to patients within six hours.

Early Detection to Prevent Another Pandemic

A faster treatment is expected to help patients and rapid pathogen sequencing will allow the UK to prevent a repeat of the COVID-19 pandemic that shook the world in 2020.

“Early detection is absolutely crucial to be able to respond effectively to any emerging pathogen,” stated Susan Hopkins, chief medical advisor of the UK Health Security Agency.

The technology of third-generation sequencing from Oxford Nanopore, as its name suggests, uses nanoscopic pores in ultra-thin protein membranes, large enough to allow a single strand of DNA to pass through them.

The DNA strands that pass through the membrane change their ionic current, allowing real-time identification of individual nucleotide bases. The company claims that its technology has an accuracy of over 99% under optimal conditions, a claim that appears to have been upheld in independent tests.

This nanopore-based sequencing technology will be used to process samples in up to 30 centers of the National Health Service (NHS) in England, as an expansion of the current NHS respiratory metagenomics program.

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The data obtained from the tests conducted under the expanded initiative will be provided to the NHS and the UK Health Security Agency in order to identify emerging diseases, and Genomics England and the UK Biobank will also contribute data.

Author: Chema Carvajal Sarabia

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