Background and acknowledgements

ECDC and the European Commission have launched a number of activities to help strengthen EU/EEA Member States’ capacity for WGS and the detection of SARS-CoV-2 variants, including a 83 Mio EUR national infrastructure programme. In addition, the new Regulation on serious cross-border threats to health and repealing Decision No 1082/2013/EU and ECDC’s updated mandate (as of 23 November 2022) includes the collection of “molecular pathogen data, if required for detecting or investigating serious cross-border threats to health”.  

In 2023 ECDC initiated a set of support activities including an ambitious training programme in genomic epidemiology and public health bioinformatics (~5.2 Mio EUR) and the disease specific implementation of WGS into EU level surveillance and outbreak response. 

The training programme in genomic epidemiology and public health bioinformatics, the “GenEpi-BioTrain”, was initiated in January 2023 and will continue over the next four years.  This course "Bridging the gaps in Bioinformatics - First Edition" is the first component of the first wave of training activities focusing on Influenza and SARS-CoV-2.

Contractors

The contract project managers for the GenEpi-BioTrain are:

•  Rene Hendriksen, DTU (main) and 
• Anders Rhod Larsen, SSI (deputy)​. 

• DTU (DK)
• SSI (DK), 
• Institut Pasteur (FR), 
• Research Centre Borstel (DE), 
• THL (FI) and 
• Karolinska Institutet & University Hospital (SE).