- What if countries where emerging infections originate, from Cameroon to Cambodia, could rapidly sequence suspect samples and discover new pathogens when only a few people have become sick?
- What if all such sequence data were immediately shared in a single global open access database?
- What if you could search for a string of sequence data and all associated data, annotations or publications as easily and effectively as a Google search?
- What if markers discovered for a new disease would quickly be incorporated into affordable hand held multi-pathogen diagnostic tests widely available at the point of care?
- What if the results of those tests were uploaded to a database where surveillance tools like Google Flu Trends could discover outbreaks?
In one piece Rajesh Gupta, Mark Michalski (of Stanford, but at Google.org last year) and I provide Google.org’s perspective and vision for how systematic application of genomics, proteomics, and bioinformatics to infectious diseases could predict and prevent the next pandemic. To realize this vision, however, we feel that a focused, coordinated and scaled-up effort would be required. We urge the community to unite under an “Infectious Disease Genomics Project,” analogous to the Human Genome Project, to accelerate today's impressive progress as reviewed by this cross-journal open access collection.
You can read more in this blog from PLoS and listen to a fascinating audio interview debate with with Jonathan Eisen, Siv Andersson, and Raj Gupta, led by Kirsten Sanford.
