On the Tail of a Virus: The Cambodian Lab Working to Unravel how COVID-19 Spreads and Grows

The COVID-19 pandemic began in earnest months ago, but the novel coronavirus that causes the disease remains somewhat shrouded in mystery. 

A team of medical researchers in Cambodia are doing their part to change that. The Kingdom’s healthcare system may be small and under-resourced, but with new technology, labs in Phnom Penh could play an important role in dissecting the inner workings of the novel coronavirus currently infecting patients around the world.

Much of that work is now happening between a team of Cambodian laboratory technicians led by National Institutes of Health (NIH) researchers Jessica Manning and Jennifer Bohl, working alongside the Virology unit of the Institut Pasteur du Cambodge, led by Philippe Dussart and Erik Karlsson.

Before the novel coronavirus landed in the Kingdom, Manning was working in Cambodia with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ (NIAID) Laboratory of Malaria and Vector Research. She was using software called “IDSeq” to identify and track pathogens by their genetic code, with her work involving digging into the various types of microbes associated with fever-causing diseases in Cambodia, such as dengue. 

That software, IDSeq, has come to be Cambodia’s weapon in the global race to unravel the mysteries of this new virus.

Click here to keep reading. Miriam Deprez and Andrew Haffner write for Globe.