Tonight, I watched the London Calling 2024 Public Health Showcase. Associate Director of Global Segment Marketing Aaron Pomerantz helped moderate the session. Lara Urban from Helmholtz AI in Germany was the first speaker. Urban described the connections between One Health Genomics and Nanopore sequencing. One Health Policy was addressed with air microbiome to assess the human health consequences of anthropogenic changes. Urban said they have preliminary data to determine virulence levels of pathogens from the squiggle data. Tetyana Vasyleva from the University of California, Irvine, spoke about social behavioral and molecular epidemiology. They use social network analysis and other techniques to analyze the impact of major events on viral transmission. Vasyleva has been studying displaced populations in the Ukraine. Anthony Hendrickx from the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands spoke about genomic surveillance of resistant organisms using long-read sequencing. They said that typing is expensive, laborious, and time-consuming. They aim to phase out short-read sequencing. In a recent study, they sequenced 196 multi-drug-resistant organisms and compared them to traditional approaches. The team is validating the accreditation approach with ISO. One question asked to Hendrickx was whether long-read data would phase out current approaches. They explained that long-read only approaches and the detection of SNPs, for example, will become the primary approach. Urban described how part of their work is collaborating with different groups, including the ones establishing policy. Vasyleva added that they absolutely need to work with people “on the ground,” including community-based organizations. Vasyleva also explained that they cannot use sequencing for diagnostics and this does cause some challenges. Hendrickx emphasized collaborations too. All three panelists highlighted how nanopore sequencing can be used in various settings with direct public health connections.
