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A partnership between the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation enabled researchers in Cambodia to sequence and confirm the country’s first case of COVID-19 in a matter of days — not the weeks it could typically take. This provided valuable, real-time insight into transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus within the global community.
The researchers in Cambodia are one of several teams around the world receiving molecular biology and bioinformatics training from the infectious disease team at the Biohub, free access, training, and compute on the IDseq platform from CZI, and the necessary equipment and supplies to begin work in their own countries through the Grand Challenges Explorations Grants.
Equipped with training and supplies, the Cambodian researchers were able to proactively assess what was happening locally by prepping and sequencing the full genome of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in-house instead of sending those samples to a lab in another country for processing. Transferring samples can corrupt them and, more importantly, takes extra time — time that is all the more valuable during an outbreak. Quicker sequencing also means quicker sharing of those data so that more researchers can derive value from them, including researchers who don’t have advanced molecular biology and engineering capabilities in their own labs.
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