Decentralised sequencing for infectious disease surveillance
Info
Start date: 1 March, 2021 End date: 28 February, 2026 Project type: Research projects in countries with extended development cooperation (earlier Window 1) Project code: 20-12-TAN Countries: Tanzania Thematic areas: Climate change, Health, Lead institution: Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center (KCMC), Tanzania Partner institutions: National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR), Tanzania State University of Zanzibar (SUZA), Tanzania Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Denmark University of Copenhagen (UCPH), Denmark Project coordinator: Tolbert Sonda Total grant: 11,998,500 DKKProject summary
Climate change is estimated to cause 250,000 additional deaths per year between 2030 and 2050, a significant proportion of which will be due to diarrhoeal diseases and infections caused by pathogens transmitted by climate-sensitive vectors affected by increasing temperatures and extreme weather events.
Tanzania’s diverse climate and topography presents a favourable context for studies into the differential risks of climate-sensitive pathogens, but currently lacks a robust system that can rapidly detect, identify, track and share information on (re)-emerging pathogens. This both limits its ability to respond to outbreaks, and impedes the analysis of long-term changes and trends needed to establish preventive policy measures.
Advances in sequencing have enabled rapid identification of complete genomic information of pathogens. ONT sequencers have demonstrated to be particularly useful in resource-limited settings because of their portability, low up-front costs and feasibility for real-time outbreak tracking of recent epidemics (e.g. Ebola, Zika and COVID-19). It has as well been used for rapid identification of bacterial infections and AMR of clinical relevance. This project proposes to create the capacity for ONT-based sequencing, analyse and real-time sharing of pathogen information at selected research centres across Tanzania. The implementation will focus on climate-sensitive and epidemic-prone pathogens that cause acute febrile illnesses and childhood diarrhoea, while creating the capacity for all-round genomics and bioinformatics work at these research centres. Finally, the project will create integrated epidemiological, meteorological and genomic databases that can be used for retrospective retrieval and analysis.
The project builds on a previous DANIDA-research funded collaboration whereby a sustainable genomics & bioinformatics unit at KCRI was established. This will form the backbone for the decentralised ’sequencing at the source’ capacity realised in this project.
