On Jun. 6, 2020, to jumpstart the Department of Defense’s (DoD) SARS-CoV-2 sequencing efforts, Armed Forces Health Surveillance Branch’s Global Emerging Infections Surveillance (GEIS) section used its existing partnerships with Army, Navy, and Air Force public health and medical research laboratories.

This connection helped to establish a collaborative approach to the sequencing capabilities. Sequence data from this collaboration will provide critical information about transmission patterns, track diagnostic effectiveness, and guide the development and evaluation of medical countermeasures for the 1.4 million active duty and 331,000 reserve personnel.

In 2017, GEIS established a Next Generation Sequencing and Bioinformatics Consortium to work with GEIS partner DoD laboratories to coordinate and improve pathogen sequencing and analysis efforts around the world. Consortium partners can rapidly detect and characterize known, emerging, and novel infectious disease agents using data from pathogen sequencing. This helps to inform force health protection decision making. The core Consortium partners include: the Naval Medical Research Center (NMRC), U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, U.S. Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine, and the Naval Health Research Center.

The sequence data that’s being collected is a valuable source of information to better understand virus transmission patterns among DoD personnel, particularly when combined with other clinical and epidemiological data. These data are also compared to global virus sequence data.

Additionally, GEIS partners are leveraging this technology to improve understanding of global circulation of SARS-CoV-2 through surveillance programs at DoD overseas labs, such as in Thailand, Peru, Kenya, and Cambodia.

These data will provide a better understanding of transmission in these locations and result in a better understanding of risk to U.S. forces deployed around the world as the COVID-19 pandemic continues. GEIS leaders hope that increased collaboration across the agencies will propel the research and production of an effective vaccine.