THE POWER OF NEXT-GEN SEQUENCING: How IDbyDNA's Explify Platform Addresses the Pandemic and On-Going Infectious Disease.

• Author: Estabrooke, Ivy

The emergence of COVID-19 has brought the fields of infectious disease and public health to the forefront of everyday life. Outside of the halls of the CDC, NIH, and research laboratories in the halls of academia, outbreaks of emerging and novel viruses, like swine flu (H1N1), SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), and MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) did notenter the public conscious in the U.S. However, the acute pandemic caused by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes COVID-19, has elevated awareness around the challenges of detecting, diagnosing, and treating a novel, highly contagious virus.

While PCR and antibody tests have become the discussion of socially distanced happy hours, new technologies, such as Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS), provide new and innovative tools for detecting and understanding more about COVID-19. Decades of research and development investment laid the groundwork for these innovative technologies that are positioned to detect both known viruses, such as flu, but also emerging viruses, like SARS-CoV-2.

The NGS method--coupled with powerful bioinformatics and machine learning--allows scientists to rapidly and affordably decode the sequence of nucleotides that make up an organism's DNA. Once decoded, advanced data analytics can be applied to provide clinically relevant insights into the pathology that is making someone ill--from mutations causing cancer in humans, to the pathogens causing the flu or an infection. This technology leverages the work of the Human Genome Project, which sequenced the entire human genome and paved the way to developing new approaches to detecting not only human or host genome sequences, but also that of pathogens and microorganisms.

Today, with the evolution of automation and analytics, the diagnostics industry has seen costs and turnaround time for sequencing decrease, beating the exponential decline dictated by Moore's law. These changes have opened the doors to new applications for use of NGS, and new companies to make that technology available to laboratories, clinicians, and public health experts.

IDbyDNA, Inc., is a leader in the development and...