Creation of the Swiss Pathogen Surveillance Platform SPSP
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Switzerland establishes a national infrastructure to track COVID-19 and its variants
Discover the role of the Swiss Pathogen Surveillance Platform SPSP, co-led by SIB, in the country’s national viral genomic surveillance strategy.
Today, the delta variant of the virus dominates the Swiss landscape. This is only possible thanks to an unprecedented sequencing effort. At the heart of the process, a national infrastructure, co-led by the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, now centralises all the genetic sequences of the virus collected in Switzerland. On the one hand, it provides the Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH) with an automated overview of the distribution and emergence of variants throughout the country. On the other hand, it allows the rapid and mass sharing of Swiss sequences with international databases. This places Switzerland among the largest contributors of SARS-CoV-2 sequences worldwide, thereby accelerating research into vaccines and treatments.