Digital Systems and Infrastructure

Genomic Surveillance Unit

Archive Page

This page is maintained as a historical record and is no longer being updated.

We developed, deployed and supported the digital systems and infrastructure that enablde the Genomic Surveillance Unit to carry out its mission. We worked closely with teams across the GSU and with external partners, collaborators, and customers to provide the digital products, cloud infrastructure, and technology needed to store and share the data generated by genomic surveillance activities. We also worked closely with the GSU teams to support internal operations and products. Following a strategic review the Wellcome Sanger Institute decided to disband its Genomic Surveillance Unit in 2026 as part of a broader institutional shift to focus exclusively on fundamental discovery science.

About us

We were a dynamic and diverse technology team of software developers, quality assurance testers, product managers, development operations (DevOps) engineers, and scrum masters who used agile methodologies to deliver and support quality software applications and digital products in the Genomic Surveillance Unit.

We worked with surveillance leads and the Surveillance Operations team to understand the digital needs of our community, building the concept of ‘delivering value’ into everything we did. We aimed to transform proof-of-concept developments into robust, production-ready, scalable digital products that support a wide variety of use cases wherever they were relevant.

Our work

Activities and projects actively supported by our team included:

• Developing and supporting an internal web-based application and database that tracks and reports on the lifecycle of a positive COVID-19 sample, from registration of plate maps through to sequencing, and ultimately feeds a subset of data to the CLIMB database in collaboration with UKHSA.
• Developing a range of digital  products for malaria parasite and mosquito genomic surveillance that support the MalariaGEN community. The most recent of these includes the BCL Uploader Tool, which helps our partners in malaria-endemic countries share raw sequencing files (in BCL format) with the GSU for processing through bioinformatic pipelines.
• Automating infrastructure in cloud environments, which involves migrating manually deployed systems to an automated continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline. This includes effective monitoring and backups in place for redundancy purposes.

We were highly collaborative in approach and worked together with teams across the Genomic Surveillance Unit to produce end-to-end digital products that support the goals of the GSU and its partners, customers, and funders.