VIDEO: Michael Zody, PhD, Discusses Collaborative SARS-CoV-2 Viral Surveillance Initiatives at the NYGC

NEW YORK, NY (August 31, 2021) –  Michael Zody, PhD, Scientific Director of Computational Biology at the New York Genome Center (NYGC), provided an overview and update of the NYGC’s collaborative SARS-CoV-2 viral surveillance initiatives at a GenomeWeb webinar entitled “Pathogen Surveillance at Scale Using Molecular Inversion Probes.”

As part of his presentation, Dr. Zody detailed the sequencing/data sharing activities of the COVID-19 Genomics Research Network (CGRN), the multi-disciplinary research consortium formed by NYGC Evnin Family Scientific Director and CEO Tom Maniatis, PhD, in March 2020. This partnership includes hospitals and academic centers in the New York/New Jersey region sending biospecimen samples from COVID-19 patients to the NYGC’s Research Sequencing Laboratory for sequencing and analysis. This data, de-identified to protect personal health information of patients, is returned to the partner institution, shared with city and state agencies, and uploaded to open-source research community databases. Dr. Zody also shared findings from two studies led by CGRN partner Hackensack Meridian Health, one focused on immunocompromised COVID patients and another on assessing post-vaccination infection breakthroughs.

Watch this excerpt of Dr. Zody’s presentation below:

Future plans for the CGRN include developing a data commons repository of its sequenced samples combined with available clinical data from partner hospitals as a further resource to the research community. Dr. Maniatis is also the moderator for ongoing CGRN meetings, which serve as information-sharing forums for the global COVID-19 genomics research community.

For more information on the CGRN and the NYGC’s COVID-19 genomics research, go to: https://www.nygenome.org/research-areas/covid-19-genomics/.