New consortium to track variants

A consortium of four city clusters — Bengaluru, Hyderabad, New Delhi and Pune — has been established to upscale SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus genomic surveillance, complementing national efforts led by the Indian SARS-Cov2 Genomic Consortia (INSACOG).

The consortium is led by CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CSIR-CCMB), Hyderabad, and it currently includes different partners in three other cities: NCBS-TIFR, InStem-DBT and NIMHANS in Bengaluru; CSIR-IGIB in New Delhi; Pune Knowledge Cluster, IISER-Pune; and CSIRNCL in Pune. It will work closely with local governments, hospitals and clinicians. In collaboration with INSACOG, the consortium aims to eventually make this a national effort by expanding to other strategic locations in India.

Financial support for the new initiative comes from the Rockefeller Foundation. This new effort will track emergence of viral variants which will be correlated to epidemiological data and clinical outcomes. The consortium plans to target sampling strategies coupled with intense surveillance and advanced computational techniques. It will also help in improving surveillance and epidemiology.

Dr Rakesh Mishra, Advisor, CSIR-CCMB, will lead these efforts along with Prof Satyajit Mayor, NCBS, Prof L.S. Shashidhara, Pune Knowledge Cluster, and Dr Anurag Agrawal, CSIR-IGIB. CCMB said the project will develop strategies and capabilities to identify Variants of Concern before they spread widely and cause outbreaks. This will also help correlate with clinical symptoms and disease severity, potentially associated with emerging variants.

Dr Vinay Nandicoori, Director, CSIR-CCMB, added, “All the partner institutes have been fighting Covid-19 since its very beginning in the country. This much-needed collaboration will bring all their strengths together in a structured fashion.”