Over a year has passed since the pandemic hit Canada and the lockdowns began. While businesses, schools, institutions, public and health services were forced to shut down or reinvent themselves, so too were scientific research laboratories. Live experiments, grant funded research and educational activities ground to a halt as scientists around the world refocused their efforts on tackling the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping the globe. Dr. Terry Snutch of the Michael Smith Laboratories is one of many researchers at UBC that did just that. Normally working with animal models focused on epilepsy, migraine and other brain disorders, Dr. Snutch decided to repurpose the use of the Oxford Nanopore technology a portable DNA sequencer, for use decoding the COVID-19 virus. Seeing the need for a coordinated approach to tackling the emerging public health crisis in Canada, Dr. Snutch rapidly reached out to public health labs and sequencing centres across the country to build up an organized network. With robust provincial support for the project and an injection of $40 million dollars from the federal government, the Canadian COVID Genomics Network (CanCOGeN) was up and running. Half of the network (VirusSeq) quickly got to work with the aim of sequencing up to 150,000 genomes of the SARS-CoV-2 virus while the other half (HostSeq) committed to sequencing up to 10,000 patient genomes in order to build a “biobank” of data. This crucial work has informed public health policy and decision making across the country and continues to track community spread and COVID-19 variants as they emerge, as well as inform vaccine development and breakthrough infections.
We caught up with Dr. Snutch to find out how the CanCOGeN network has grown over the last 16 months, to reflect on the notable contributions of UBC researchers to the global health crisis, to understand how the experience of the pandemic has impacted the field of genomics and to learn more about what scientists in the community are looking forward to as restrictions ease here in British Columbia.
