Integrated Surveillance Suite for Targeting Interventions to Cholera Outbreaks

Infectious disease control requires ground-breaking, ultrasensitive biosensing technologies coupled with tools to monitor, predict and contain an outbreak’s spread. Currently a range of infectious and potentially lethal diseases such as cholera, TB and HIV go undetected for too long while patients suffer as treatment is either non-existent or misguided. The global pandemic caused by COVID-19 has revealed the devastating health, economic and social consequences of the lack of diagnostic tools and integrated containment strategies. Moreover, too often uncontained diseases disproportionately impact LMICs. Advances in diagnostic technology, mobile-Health infrastructure, epidemiological frameworks, and data visualisation, make now an opportune time to further progress and integrate these efforts for the control of infectious disease. In this research programme, we will integrate these previously disparate strands into a comprehensive effort to fight cholera. We take a multidisciplinary approach, and as such engineers, biologists, computer scientists, materials scientists, chemists, physicists, mathematicians, and clinicians harness their individual expertise to collectively tackle the challenge to control cholera. By building on discoveries and insights we will deliver in this proposal, we aim in the longer run to deliver end-to-end efforts to contain other deadly diseases in geographies where they are most needed.