EIT Oxford EIT Pathogena

EIT (Ellison Institute of Technology) Oxford, through its Pathogen Programme, has launched EIT Pathogena, a genomic analysis tool for Mycobacterium. Built on Oracle cloud technology, this bioinformatics pipeline enables the assembly, variant calling, and comprehensive analysis of pathogen sequences, offering insights into species identification, drug susceptibility prediction, and the detection of outbreak clusters, EIT Oxford said. The initial focus of the pipeline is Mycobacterium tuberculosis and non-TB mycobacteria. EIT Pathogena will soon be scaled to cover additional pathogens including, E. coli, Shigella spp., Klebsiella spp., Salmonella spp., Staphylococcus aureus, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, and Acinetobacter baumannii.

According to an EIT Oxford spokesperson, EIT Pathogena is currently free for all individual users in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), or who are based in high-income countries (HICs) but are working with Mycobacterium samples collected from LMICs. Organizations based in HICs processing HIC samples will also be able to access the system for an extended free trial, the spokesperson said.