Cellulitis TPP (Target Product Profile)

Doctors currently diagnose cellulitis—a serious bacterial skin infection—by looking at the patient and guessing, which often leads to wrong treatment. This matters because cellulitis is frequently misdiagnosed as other skin conditions such as eczema or venous ulcers. When patients are incorrectly treated for cellulitis, they receive unnecessary antibiotics, which fuels antimicrobial resistance, and the real underlying problem goes untreated. Conversely, genuine cases of cellulitis can be missed, leading to delays in life-saving antibiotic therapy. There is no reliable, rapid diagnostic test available in clinics or GP surgeries to tell the difference. This project is building a Target Product Profile (TPP)—a detailed specification of what a new diagnostic device must do, who should use it, and under what conditions. The team has already interviewed healthcare practitioners and held patient and public involvement sessions with people who have had cellulitis. They are now assembling a core stakeholder group of experts and lived-experience contributors to agree on the device’s requirements through an iterative consensus process. If this work succeeds, it will provide a clear blueprint for developers to create a diagnostic tool that could be used in GP surgeries or emergency departments. That would reduce unnecessary hospital admissions, cut inappropriate antibiotic use, and ensure patients with cellulitis get the right treatment faster. The immediate output is not a device itself, but the specification that makes building one possible.