Key points
- CDC's Advanced Molecular Detection (AMD) program is helping build and integrate the use of genomic sequencing technologies into public health nationwide.
- The cumulative local investment to Colorado from FY2021-2023 is $11,316,181.
- Colorado serves the Mountain region as the AMD Training Lead and Community of Practice Domain Lead.
Total state and local investment: $11,316,181
Funding to public health departments includes support from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and AMD annual appropriations in FY2021-2023.
Implementing AMD technology
The AMD program builds and integrates laboratory, bioinformatics, and epidemiology technologies across CDC and nationwide. Since 2014, AMD has received support from Congress—now a $40 million per year appropriation—to implement these technologies in public health programs. Through investments in AMD technologies, CDC is improving both public health outcomes and preparedness in dozens of areas including foodborne disease, influenza, antibiotic resistance, hepatitis, pneumonia, and meningitis.
With funding from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, the AMD program developed a multi-year plan to its expand support to state, local, and territorial public health laboratories providing more staff and resources to collect and sequence SARS-CoV-2 specimens, identify and track variants, and share data for public health use.
Workforce development
Colorado is part of the Mountain region. In 2018, the AMD program established seven workforce development regions across the country. Each region has an AMD training lead and a bioinformatics lead. This provides a network of customized AMD support which helps develop skills and provides training assistance to public health labs across the country.
Colorado's AMD Training Lead provides support to labs in the region on pathogen-specific training and cross-cutting AMD training to help staff develop the critical skills necessary to extract, analyze, and interpret sequencing data. From the region's training resources, Colorado receives lab support on data analysis and how to interface with IT departments.
AMD Platform Community of Practice (CoP)
The Office of AMD has established five communities of practice to build processes and tools for relevant interests, concerns, and priorities regarding the AMD Platform. The AMD Platform will serve CDC programs and STLT partners by providing a common infrastructure to perform genomic epidemiology and contribute high-quality data to publicly available data repositories. Colorado's Domain Leader facilitates collaboration between OAMD and the public health community for the IT Security and Privacy CoP.