The Rockefeller Foundation announced grants totaling more than $20 million as well as non-financial collaborations to help strengthen global capabilities to detect and respond to pandemic threats.

A first step in the development of the foundation's Pandemic Prevention Institute, the grants and agreements are aimed at expanding capacity for the sequencing of pathogen genomes in sub-Saharan Africa, India, and the United States and strengthening a global network of organizations with accessible genomic sequencing information and other data. To that end, the foundation will work with more than twenty organizations from the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, including the CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (Hyderabad, India) and a consortium of pathogen genomics sequencing centers, which will develop targeted sampling strategies, optimize bioinformatics tools, and enable real-time understanding of viral evolution while building a long-term pathogen genomics and surveillance platform; Illumina (San Diego, California), which will develop genomic sequencing technologies and informatic solutions that build on local capacity; and FasterCures at the Milken Institute (Washington, D.C.), which will convene leaders to galvanize the creation of an early warning system that coordinates action on data, insights, and proactive financing for pandemic preparedness.

Part of Rockefeller's $1 billion commitment announced last October in support of an equitable global recovery, the Pandemic Prevention Institute also will collaborate with other pandemic prevention efforts, including the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence and the United Kingdom's Global Pandemic Radar, to identify disease outbreaks early and stop them in the first hundred days.

"Fast, accurate genomic sequencing information is the key to ending the COVID-19 pandemic and the suffering it has caused," said Rockefeller Foundation president Rajiv J. Shah. "Yet, today only fourteen countries, all of which have developed economies, are sequencing 5 percent or more of their cases and sharing them through global databases."

"As the virus evolves, we have to ensure that vaccines, our best tools for stopping it and its deadly toll on individuals, families and communities, remain effective," said Rick Bright, senior vice president of pandemic preparedness at the Rockefeller Foundation. "Rapidly sharing genomic sequencing information from all corners of the globe enables us to see and understand how the virus is changing and adapt our tools accordingly. Without this information we risk the pandemic continuing to wreak havoc on our lives."

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