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Asia PGI Awarded Funding for Environmental Surveillance Programme

Asia PGI awarded funding to launch environmental surveillance programme for early disease detection.

With the support of The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), the Asia Pathogen Genomics Initiative* is launching a new wastewater surveillance programme which uses genomics for early infectious disease detection.

Genomic sequencing is a powerful new tool that can quickly and accurately detect infectious pathogens. Wastewater is a low-cost and unobtrusive approach for collecting specimens. When combined with genomics, it provides a picture of what underlying pathogens might be circulating in a community. The approach has potential to be of highest-value in lower-resource settings where clinical surveillance systems face challenges and where disease risks are the highest.

“Wastewater-based genomic surveillance is a potential early warning system for outbreak detection” says Assistant Professor Vincent Pang from the Duke-NUS Centre for Outbreak Preparedness. “During the COVID-19 pandemic, it was able to detect disease signals 1-2 weeks before a surge in symptomatic cases infected by new variants were reported in the healthcare systems.”

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Wastewater surveillance being conducted at a sewage point

The award from BMGF will support:

 

  1. The establishment of a regional expert group (comprising representatives from the Asia PGI network of 14 Asian countries), with a primary focus on environmental surveillance.
  2. Training and capacity development to equip countries in the Asia PGI network with standardized workflows, bringing awareness to the latest innovations and scientific advancements in the field of environmental surveillance.
  3. Direct financing to several countries in the region who are pioneering novel approaches within environmental surveillance.

“If we’re going to move quickly in this new space, experimentation, shared learning between countries and documenting best practices will be essential” added A/Prof Pang. 

*Asia PGI Wastewater Surveillance partners include Duke-NUS Medical School (Centre for Outbreak Preparedness, Programme on Emerging Infectious Diseases), Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Programme for Research in Epidemic Preparedness and REsponse (PREPARE), and the National Environment Agency. 

For more information, contact Vincent Pang at vincentpang@duke-nus.edu.sg