Associate Professor and Co-Founder of Austrakka
| Selected winner: | The University of Melbourne |
| Solution name: | AusTrakka - a national genomics surveillance platform |
| Origin of the winner: | Australia |
Microbiological Diagnostic Unit Public Health Laboratory at the University of Melbourne is Victoria’s genomics public health laboratory and is funded by the Australia's Victorian Department of Health for the testing and genomic sequencing of notifiable pathogens and organisms of public health significance, including foodborne diseases, antimicrobial resistance, invasive bacterial pathogens and sexually transmitted infections.
AusTrakka - a national genomics surveillance platform
AusTrakka is Australia’s national genomics surveillance system. AusTrakka is governed by the Communicable Diseases Genomics Network and operationalised by a team of genomic epidemiologists, bioinformaticians and software developers. Public health laboratories upload genomic data to view their sequences in the national context via a phylogenetic tree to identify ‘matches’ that may infer transmission or clusters for further investigation. It has assisted with informing public health investigations, provided real-time genomic surveillance of the COVID-19 pandemic, and supported public health laboratories with genomic analysis capacity where it was limited.
The Challenge winners are solely responsible for their contributions and views. They do not necessarily reflect those of WHO. In no event shall WHO be responsible for the accuracy of information shared by any of the participants. These solutions were judged for their merits as novel, creative solutions but no specific technology assessment was applied, nor any endorsement in practice should be implied.