MoGen Seminar Series - Dr. Andrew McArthur McMaster University
Molecular Departmental Seminar Speakers Series 2024
Host: Medical Genomics Students
Guest Speaker: Andrew McArthur, PhD
Affiliation: McMaster University
Location: Galbraith Building, 35 St. George Street. Room 220
Date: Monday, November 11th, 2024
Time: 3 PM-4 PM
Genomics of Pandemics Fast & Slow: COVID-19 and Antimicrobial Resistance
Once obscure and only known in the realm of public health officials and infectious disease researchers, due to the COVID-19 pandemic the public is now readily familiar with the concept of genomic variants. What is less obvious is the decades of work that enabled Canada and other countries to rapidly pivot to real-time genomic surveillance during a pandemic. Driven by two market forces – increasingly fast global internet and drastically dropping DNA sequencing costs – we are entering the age of genomic surveillance of infectious disease. Yet, while the recent focus has been on COVID-19, this obscures a more sinister and slower moving pandemic – the undermining of modern medicine by increasing rates of drug-resistant infections. The McArthur lab at McMaster leads the Comprehensive Antibiotic Resistance Database (card.mcmaster.ca), a globally used tool for genomic surveillance of the genes underlying antimicrobial resistance (AMR), but during the COVID-19 pandemic also developed the SARS-CoV-2 Illumina GeNome Assembly Line (SIGNAL) software in collaboration with the Public Health Agency of Canada for national tracking of COVID-19 variants. Yet, these two pandemics are not independent. While the COVID-19 pandemic has likely ushered in the age of genomic surveillance a decade earlier than expected use of antimicrobials to treat secondary infections in COVID-19 patients has also accelerated rates of AMR. Combined with other international events, most notably war and the accompanying refuge crises where safe use of antimicrobials is inconsistent, we are entering a new century of infectious disease where emergent or re-emergent viral outbreaks will co-occur with a degrading of our medical arsenal due to the loss of antimicrobials. Like the development of COVID-19 vaccines, next generation solutions will increasingly be informed by the genomic landscape of these pathogens.