Public Accounts Committee

S T A N D I N G C O M M I T T E E O F T Y N W A L D C O U R T O F F I C I A L R E P O R T R E C O R T Y S O I K O I L B I N G V E A Y N T I N V A A L P R O C E E D I N G S D A A L T Y N PUBLIC ACCOUNTS COMMITTEE Genomic Sequencing HANSARD Douglas, Thursday, 1st April 2021 PP2021/0129 PAC-GS, No. 1/2021 All published Official Reports can be found on the Tynwald website: www.tynwald.org.im/business/hansard Published by the Office of the Clerk of Tynwald, Legislative Buildings, Finch Road, Douglas, Isle of Man, IM1 3PW. © High Court of Tynwald, 2021 STANDING COMMITTEE, THURSDAY, 1st APRIL 2021 Members Present: Chairman: Hon. J P Watterson SHK Ms J M Edge MHK Mr L L Hooper MHK Mrs J P Poole-Wilson MLC Mr C R Robertshaw MHK Clerk: Mrs J Corkish Assistant Clerk: Ms N Lowney Contents Procedural ............................................................................................................................. 3 EVIDENCE OF Dr Rachel Glover, Chief Scientific Officer, Taxa Genomics Limited ......................... 3 The Committee sat in private at 5.31 p.m. .............................................................................. 41 __________________________________________________________________ 2 PAC-GS/21 STANDING COMMITTEE, THURSDAY, 1st APRIL 2021 Standing Committee of Tynwald on Public Accounts Genomic sequencing The Committee met virtually at 2.30 p.m. Proceedings were conducted and broadcast live from the Legislative Council Chamber. [MR SPEAKER in the Chair] Procedural The Chairman (Mr Speaker): Good afternoon everyone and welcome to this public meeting of the Public Accounts Committee. I am Juan Watterson, Speaker of the House of Keys and I chair the Committee. With me are the Vice Chair, Mr Lawrie Hooper MHK; Mrs Jane Poole-Wilson MLC, Chair of the Constitutional and Legal Affairs and Justice Committee; Ms Julie Edge MHK, Chairman 5 of the Social Affairs Policy Review Committee; Mr Chris Robertshaw MHK, Chair of the Economic Policy Review Committee; and our Clerks, Jo Corkish in the Chamber and Nina Lowney on screen. Mrs Clare Barber, as a political member of the Department of Health and Social Care, has recused herself from this inquiry. For the purposes of Hansard, I will be ensuring that we do not have two people speaking at 10 once. This session is being as held as part of the Committee’s inquiry into the use of genomic sequencing in response to a pandemic in the Isle of Man. Today we welcome Dr Rachel Glover, Chief Scientific Officer at Taxa Genomics Limited. Welcome, Dr Glover. 15 Dr Glover: Thank you, and thank you for inviting me today. EVIDENCE OF Dr Rachel Glover, Chief Scientific Officer, Taxa Genomics Limited The Chairman: I would like to call on Mrs Poole-Wilson, if she would like to start the ball rolling, please. Q1. Mrs Poole-Wilson: Yes, thank you, Chair, and welcome, Dr Glover. 20 Given our inquiry, I wonder if you could start please by telling us a bit about the purpose of genomic sequencing? Dr Glover: Genomics has been around for about 20-25 years and what it can do really depends on the questions that are being asked. One of the most important changes over the last 20 years 25 was the genomic sequencing of the human genome, of course, so everybody usually has an awareness of that. But what we can also do is sequence – and that phrase ‘sequence’ means that we read the letters, the A, C, T and Gs, the DNA or RNA letters of the organism, and we can do __________________________________________________________________ 3 PAC-GS/21 STANDING COMMITTEE, THURSDAY, 1st APRIL 2021 that for pathogens as well. So obviously it has come to light with COVID that this is really rather useful, but it is actually not a new technique that has come in with COVID testing. It is something 30 that has been around for quite a long time now. Genomics has a lot of different purposes but for virus testing and for pathogens what it means is that we can look at those RNA letters of the virus’s instructions, their genetic instructions, and see how the virus is evolving over time. And so in the public domain you will be hearing about things like strains or lineages, and what that means is that it is a distinct number of mutations 35 present in that isolate of that virus from that patient and, of course, patients who have been infected from the same source, for example, will have the same lineage and they will also have individual mutations in that. So genomics is something that we can use very usefully in an applied manner but it is also something that can be used for blue-sky thinking for academics to answer questions about 40 genetics and to answer questions about inheritance and inherited disease, as well as for pathogen testing. Q2. Mrs Poole-Wilson: Great, thank you. That is really clear and helpful. You have talked about how it can be used in the context of pathogens and it sounds to me, 45 from what you have said about tracing lineage and also mutations, that its use in a practical sense is of high import. I just wanted to ask for your comment on the different approaches, I suppose, that different countries have taken. So, for example, in recent Answers in Tynwald and the House of Keys, our Chief Minister and Minister for Health and Social Care have described genomic sequencing as an epidemiological 50 surveillance tool but not part of informing the immediate response to the crisis, whereas a recently published Guernsey document, the Bailiwick Blueprint, for moving forward to live with the virus has got a recommendation that a ‘Local capacity for sequencing and identification of variants of concern should be developed and used to inform the public health response as we transition to live with the virus.’ So it seems to me they are quite different thought processes and 55 responses, and I would just be interested in your comment on those two different approaches, please? Dr Glover: Sure. This time last year, in March 2020, the United Kingdom government funded a large project called COG-UK, it is now known as COG-UK, it was Coronavirus Sequencing, and what 60 that did was set up a network of academic labs and academics who could provide both the technology and the expertise to sequence the viral genomes from coronavirus isolates that had been submitted for PCR testing by hospitals, to actually see the variation in the viruses that were circulating in the country and also coming into the country. So effectively it was set up as an academic surveillance tool, and this project builds upon a large number of projects that came 65 before it. Back in 2009, myself and colleagues were sequencing RNA viral genomes to identify new pathogens; come 2013-2014 the more clinical side of academia were looking at this for Ebola outbreaks in West Africa and a lot of the infrastructure and expertise was built upon projects like that moving forward. So when coronavirus became a huge pandemic issue, of course, the UK had 70 that expertise to build upon and jump in and say, ‘Hey, we should really be sequencing these and seeing what is going on, because we have the technological capability to do so’. But ultimately COG-UK is there to look at surveillance, it is there to look at the country as an overview and to see what is circulating, whether there are new variants of concern coming out and about, whether there are variants, such as the ones from South Africa and Brazil, coming into 75 the country and where they are going in the country. But academically it is quite a broad stroke to look at it that way, you are looking at it for tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of isolates and patients over a country-wide geographical area. __________________________________________________________________ 4 PAC-GS/21 STANDING COMMITTEE, THURSDAY, 1st APRIL 2021 With regard to the ways in which genomics can be used, yes, you can use it in that academic way and look back at an epidemic, but also my experience as a civil servant in the UK government, 80 the way that we used genomics to track pathogens, was on a very real time basis. An example of this was a procedure that we developed actually for the food industry to track campylobacter around sandwich factories. So bacteria mutate, just like viruses do, and food producers, obviously if they get a pathogen in their factory they want to know where it came from, which machine it originated in and how to clean it down so that it never happens again, but that 85 also means that we have to sequence those isolates and we have to track them, and that is where genomic epidemiology comes from. And it is the same principle whether it is tracking campylobacter around a sandwich factory or whether you are tracking virus isolates from patient to patient. The isolates themselves are actually unique versions of the virus effectively, so the coronavirus 90 itself is just a little under 30,000 letters long and it is made of RNA. The letters are A, C, U and G, and you have to imagine that as a 30,000 letter instruction book, so if you think of it as a book chapter where you have got paragraphs in there and a paragraph might give you a specific piece of information, in a virus that paragraph is a gene and it codes for the production of a protein, and that protein might have a job.

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