Ede, Nigeria — Researchers at the African Center of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases (ACEGID), Redeemer's University, Ede, Nigeria, have begun a partnership with the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and other research and public health partners, to implement a Sentinel project for an early warning system in Africa.

Led by Christian Happi and Pardis Sabeti, both researchers who have been studying infectious diseases together for two decades, the project aims to combine genomics with new information technologies in the detection and response to emerging viral threats in real-time.

But while it's clear that we are all very much behind the curve, this pandemic will hopefully prompt government leaders to take up new tools and technologies to combat COVID-19, and to prepare for future outbreaks," said Pardis Sabeti, Member, Broad Institute; Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University; and Professor, Department of Immunology and Infectious Disease at Harvard Chan School of Public Health.

And in the third pillar, the project will empower public health experts by training thousands of healthcare professionals to use the sentinel tools and deploy the diagnostic technologies for population-level testing, building on previous experiences of ACEGID and the Broad Institute in training over 900 individuals from around the world.

The project partners will leverage their existing partnerships and cutting-edge genomics capacity and experience in containing diseases such as monkeypox, yellow fever, Ebola, Zika, and Lassa fever to pilot the project in West and Central Africa, and eventually scale up to other African countries and regions.