Professor Alan Christoffels’ whirlwind three-day trip to Switzerland and Germany in March proved a productive one as it lay the groundwork for exciting new ventures for global bioinformatics and for PHA4GE. 

The first stop was the city of Lausanne, home to the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), an academic not-for-profit foundation that oversees bioinformatics activities in Switzerland. Here, Christoffels – representing both PHA4GE and the South African National Bioinformatics Institute (SANBI), of which he is the director – and colleague Associate Professor Nicki Tiffin, chair of the PHA4GE ethics & data sharing working group, attended a meeting of the Pathogen Data Network (PDN). The PDN is a global consortium dedicated to linking global data and tools in response to infectious disease and outbreaks.    

The second stop on Christoffels’ trip was a visit to the World Health Organisation’s Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence, within which is headquartered another global network, the International Pathogen Surveillance Network (IPSN), which promotes the acceleration of pathogen genomics. In Berlin, Christoffels met with numerous members of both organisations, Dr Oliver Morgan, director of the WHO Pandemic Hub, and Dr Josefina Campos and Dr Fausta Mosha. 

Talks centred around strengthening collaborations between PHA4GE and IPSN, as well as potential workshops and events that can assist countries’ efforts to conduct cost analyses of adding pathogen genomics to national public health agendas. Another topic of discussion was the development of global ecosystem to harness data and analytics. 

“I see this as a reminder that data is not knowledge,” notes Christoffels. “And building an interconnected world allows us to extract knowledge from data.”