Dr. Christian Happi

And then eventually today, we wouldn't have been in the situation where we are.

So clearly, it's simply because there have really not been intentional investment on disease surveillance using a genomic approach.

The Sentinel system is an early warning system for pandemic preemption and response.

It is that system that we invented and started implementing in 2014 to change the way we respond to disease outbreak.

And in 2014, we tested and pressure tested and validated the Sentinel system.

That was when we had the largest Ebola outbreak ever.

And that was in West Africa.

Yes.

And the Sentinel system is built on three major pillars.

The first pillar is detect, which is basically detection in near real time of known and unknown pathogens, and eventually developing tools to detect pathogens very quickly and share this information with national public health authorities.

The second pillar is connect.

That is basically making sure the information is available in real time to policymakers and people across the decision-making chain so that they can use those information to make targeted and very coordinated intervention to respond to outbreak.

Because we've realized that, you know, you need two major things to contain an outbreak.

One is speed.

Second is accuracy.

And then the third pillar is empower.

Pretty much that is empowering all the actors that are involved in disease surveillance and in outbreak response in a way that everybody across the value chain is empowered.

And then they can actually use and we can coordinate the response in a way that from grassroots to the top, you know, everybody is involved and everybody feel concerned.

The Sentinel system actually demonstrated its ability and its capability in 2014.

For the first time, we're sequencing the genome of Ebola in West Africa and in Africa.