Pasteur Network and GeoSeeq Foundation Partner to Tackle Climate-Associated Increases in Infectious Disease

Complex global challenges are best addressed by unlocking the power of existing networks and empowering institutes anchored in local communities. This new partnership brings together Pasteur Network — a storied and unique organization covering a breadth of countries, people and public health challenges — with nonprofit GeoSeeq Foundation — an AI-powered platform for tracking emerging and circulating pathogens, microbial discovery and predictive modeling.

Paris and New York, October 31^st, 2023.

The threat of infectious diseases is constant and far-reaching, killing 14 million people annually. Changes in climate are exacerbating infectious disease threats, especially for water- and vector-borne diseases. These increased infectious disease threats are most often distributed in low- and middle-income countries, which experience annual surges in dengue virus, malaria, cholera and other infections. While prevention is the ideal approach to controlling infectious diseases, there is limited cross-border surveillance and coordination to drive prevention and response. Furthermore, despite recent lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic, there is still no global system for infectious disease monitoring. Instead, existing platforms are siloed and single-modality or single-region focused.

Today, Pasteur Network and the GeoSeeq Foundation are announcing a partnership to usher in a new era of global pathogen monitoring and response, supporting the Pasteur Network’s 32 institutes distributed across 25 countries on five continents and powered by Biotia’s GeoSeeq platform, an AI platform leveraging diverse data streams, including climate, genomics and public health data. This partnership is facilitating new, equitable solutions for data sharing, cross-entity discovery and pathogen tracking to drive analytics and predictive models that flag circulating and emerging threats.

The partners are tackling challenges ranging from data governance (using a federated storage-based approach), platform and model development (empowering community-driven model development) to interpretation of signals working with local governments and translation to actionable insights, equity, funding and implementation. It is expected that this partnership will have an outsized impact in the Global South — as 75% of Pasteur Network members work in laboratories for the ministries of health in the low and middle-income countries (LMICs) — with an initial focus on vector-borne diseases of dengue virus and malaria.

“This partnership marks an important step toward unlocking untapped potential across a leading global infectious disease network”, said Dr. Rebecca Grais, executive director of Pasteur Network. “Unlocking network potential can transform separate initiatives into a global engine of discovery and more equitable, actionable public health information”.

GeoSeeq is designed to overcome cross-border data-sharing challenges and preserve data sovereignty while still allowing data to be indexed and connected on a common platform. With this capability, the partners anticipate connecting more than 40 million data points over the next three years. This will drive new collaborations, facilitate discovery and enhance response to infectious disease threats. It will also enable impactful data-driven health responses, create new infectious disease dashboards for ministries of health and support the development of novel therapeutics, biological discoveries and vaccine design.

“Through this partnership, we are launching an ambitious, open and dedicated international effort”, said Dr. Christopher Mason, president and cofounder of the GeoSeeq Foundation. “Pathogens move readily across nations’ borders; thus, collaboration should also seamlessly move internationally between scientists, physicians and policymakers. This partnership is an essential step toward making this vision a reality”.

“Too often, groups feel isolated in their fight against infectious diseases”, said Dr. Amadou Sall, director general of the Institut Pasteur de Dakar and president of Pasteur Network. “This partnership helps to level the playing field, providing support and tools for local groups to tackle regional problems that affect their local communities”.

The Pasteur Network is a vast human and scientific community with more than 30 members in over 20 countries contributing together to global health. Located in the heart of endemic areas, the network has privileged access to a large number of pathogens that it monitors and studies on all five continents. This exceptional diversity makes the Pasteur Network a unique global actor in public health, science, innovation and education, especially in the fight against infectious diseases.

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GeoSeeq Foundation is a nonprofit empowering infectious disease researchers and public health agencies globally to track, understand and control infectious disease threats.
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• Juliette Hardy, Pasteur Network, +33 6 19 36 46 45, cominter@pasteur.fr,
  https://www.pasteur-network.org
• Lathum Nelson, GeoSeeq Foundation, (385) 743-1724, lathum.nelson@stagemarketing.com, https://www.geoseeq.com/