By Francois Giudice, Correspondent France

A global leader in specialized clinical pathology and member of the Cerba HealthCare Group, Laboratoire Cerba,has detected a case of the Omicron variant from the sample of a patient arriving from Nigeria who was tested at Roissy Charles De Gaulle airport. The authorities – Santé Publique France [Public Health France], Agence Régionale de Santé Ile de France [Paris Regional Health Agency] and Direction Générale de Santé [General Directorate for Health]- were immediately informed.

Laboratoire Cerba, chosen last October by the French Health Authorities to participate in the Emergen consortium, carries out between 1,000 and 1,500 sequencings per week with results returned in less than 5 days.

CEO of Laboratoire Cerba Sylvie Cado explains: “From the beginning of the epidemic, we have been working closely with the Authorities and the National Reference Centres to share the information and the strains of interest in order to support our Authorities in steering public policy: the systematic approach to high-throughput sequencing of the virus has meant that we can build a refined and real-time picture of the epidemiology and viral circulation in our country.”

The sequencing of SARS CoV-2 fits into the strategy of the Group, which in 2013 was the first private sector player in France to have a high-throughput sequencing platform.

Laboratoire Cerba has been carrying out high-throughput sequencing of the SARS CoV-2 virus since October 2020 as part of its specialized clinical pathology activity in clinical trials, contributing to various studies looking at vaccines or anti-COVID therapeutic approaches.