Background and acknowledgements

Background

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" is the first component for participants on block 1, covering two pathogen-waves each year.


Contractors

The contract project managers for the GenEpi-BioTrain are:

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

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


Acknowledgements

This course has been created by a large team of experts in diverse fields:

Academic content coordinator: Kirsten Ellegaard (SSI)

Course coordinators: Valeria Bortolaia (SSI), Anders Rhod Larsen (SSI)

Facilitators (alphabetic order):

Gitte Nygaard Aasbjerg (SSI)

Marta Maria Ciucani (SSI)

Leandro Andrés Escobar-Herrera (SSI)

Luca Freschi (ECDC)

Pernille Gymoese (SSI)

Søren Hallstrøm (SSI)

Henrik Hasman (SSI)

Katrine Grimstrup Joensen (SSI)

Thor Bech Johannesen (SSI)

Kasper Thystrup Karstensen (SSI)

Egne Kudirkiene (SSI)

Hülya Kaya (SSI)

Niamh Lacy-Roberts (DTU)

Karen Loaiza Conza (SSI)

Khemintra Maisikrod (SSI)

Povilas Matusevicius (SSI)

Priyanka Nannapaneni (ECDC)

Sofie Holtsmark Nielsen (SSI)

Andreas Petersen (SSI)

Astrid Rasmussen (SSI)

Raphael Sieber (SSI)

Marc Stegger (SSI)

Lauge Holm Sørensen (SSI)

Man-Hung Eric Tang (SSI)

Bartlomiej Wilkowski (SSI)



Last modified: Wednesday, 24 April 2024, 1:40 PM