Implementation of Pandemic Preparedness Plan using Integrated Genomic Surveillance programs.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the landscape of public health priorities and flagged the need for a global pandemic preparedness plan to address the current and upcoming health emergencies. Creating a European Health Emergency and Preparedness Response Authority (HERA) is the cornerstone of the European plan to prevent, detect, and rapidly respond to health emergencies. The HERA incubator grant boosted the national drive in capacity building in genomic and molecular microbiology. The Laboratoire national de santé (LNS), Luxembourg, and the National Institute of Public Health (NIPH), Romania, have agreed to initiate the (PANDOMIC) partnership that includes the Cantacuzino NMMIRD as an affiliated Romanian entity. This partnership aims to ensure complementarity and knowledge sharing in microbial genomics and downstream data analysis to develop a robust national integrated genomic surveillance program. A lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic was that cross-border collaboration adds value to public health measures, especially regarding laboratory diagnosis and surveillance systems. Our plan is implemented through a structured work package program led by LNS to expand the current WGS capacities to cover other viral pathogens of pandemic potential such as influenza, while building these capacities either in new sites (Romania) or introducing a new sequencing technology (ONT). The PANDOMIC will address the antimicrobial resistance concern by adopting a one health approach, in which LNS will showcase the integration of human, animal, and environmental bacterial genomic data to provide a comprehensive genomic map of AMR in Luxembourg. A significant component of this project is establishing a data hub and a biorepository that will gather genomic data with other metadata such as clinical data and infection outcomes which would be a vital input for any public health action during pandemics and allow interoperability among a potential public health laboratories alliance.