Total Investment: $23,470,226

State and Local Investment: $13,521,905

Research Awards: $2,748,321

Centers of Excellence (FY22-23): $7,200,000

Western Bioinformatic Regional Resource Lead, Western AMD Training Lead, and Community of Practice Domain Lead

Washington is part of the Western region. In 2018, the AMD program established 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.

Washington’s Bioinformatic Regional Resource Lead acts as a regional consultant. They provide support to labs within the region on data analysis and how to interface with IT departments. Its 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.

CDC’s Advanced Molecular Detection (AMD) program builds and integrates laboratory, bioinformatics, and epidemiology technologies across CDC and nationwide. Since 2014, AMD has received support from Congress through a $30 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 has developed a multi-year plan to expand its support to state, local, and territorial public health laboratories with more staff and resources to collect specimens for COVID-19 testing, sequence them to identify and track SARS-CoV-2 variants, and share data, now and future years.

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