EPSRC IRC in Early-Warning Sensing Systems for Infectious Diseases

传染病的出现和重新出现是对人类健康的最大威胁之一。传染病的爆发就其性质而言，可迅速蔓延，给健康和生计造成巨大损失。例如，估计有3500万人感染HIV，耐抗生素病原体如MRSA是一个主要的全球公共卫生问题，大流行性流感在英国政府风险登记册（内阁办公室“国家紧急情况风险登记册2012版”）上被评为最大的国家风险。早期诊断在传染病的治疗、护理和预防方面发挥着至关重要的作用。然而，在世界范围内，许多感染仍然没有得到诊断和治疗，或者由于诊断工具不佳而在后期才被诊断出来，导致严重感染的持续传播或新出现的威胁的识别延迟，导致数百万人的重大人类和经济后果。我们的愿景是建立EPSRC跨学科研究中心，以创建新一代的早期预警传感系统来诊断，监测和预防传染病的传播。这项大规模的合作将汇集来自伦敦大学学院、帝国理工学院、伦敦卫生与热带医学院和纽卡斯尔大学的科学家、工程师和计算机科学家，以及NHS利益相关者、健康保护局和行业合作伙伴。IRC将跨越并超越传统的研究界限，开创创新的纳米移动的诊断测试，可用于全科医生手术，社区环境和发展中国家，与智能数字监控系统连接，在网络上搜索信息以发现疾病的早期指标。移动的电话技术的巨大发展（全球估计有60亿用户）为即时诊断提供了新的机会，其内置能力可将结果安全地传输到公共医疗保健系统。挑战在于创建强大的多标记传感器平台，可以以高灵敏度和特异性诊断早期感染。我们的战略将无缝整合支持我们团队最近在生物标志物发现、捕获涂层、纳米颗粒、纳米图案化、传感器系统、无线连接、数据挖掘和诊断的健康经济分析等不同领域取得突破的科学卓越性。此外，我们将探索创新的新战略，通过搜索包括谷歌、Facebook和Twitter在内的数百万个网络信息来源，寻找感染的早期指标（在此我们创造了“电子标记”一词），以确定疫情，即使是来自不去诊所的人或来自传统公共卫生工作看不到的地理区域。通过为医生、社区工作者和公共卫生组织提供有关新发感染的实时、地理关联信息，这些信息将在“仪表板”显示屏上可视化，我们将支持更快速、分层、综合的循证干预措施，使个人和人群受益。我们的破坏性预警传感能力将为NHS和全球医疗体系带来重大的人类和经济利益。最终受益者将是患者，因为早期诊断将使他们能够更快地获得更好的治疗，有助于减少痛苦和死亡风险。社会将受益于防止不知道自己感染的人继续传播感染，并为子孙后代保留宝贵的抗菌药物的有效性。NHS和医疗保健系统将通过简化患者路径而受益，允许在一次访问中提供测试和结果，从而提供更具成本效益的社区护理解决方案。我们的技术还将为英国工业提供新的商业机会。

The emergence and re-emergence of infectious diseases is one of the greatest threats to human health. By their very nature, outbreaks of infectious disease can spread rapidly, causing enormous losses to health and livelihood. For example, an estimated 35-million people are HIV-infected, antibiotic resistant pathogens such as MRSA are a major global public health problem and pandemic influenza is rated as the greatest national risk on the UK government risk register (Cabinet Office 'National Risk Register for Civil Emergencies 2012 Edition'). Early diagnosis plays a vital role in the treatment, care and prevention of infectious diseases. However worldwide, many infections remain undiagnosed and untreated or are diagnosed at the late stage due to poor diagnostic tools, resulting in on-going transmission of serious infections or delay in the identification of emerging threats, leading to major human and economic consequences for millions of people.Our vision is to establish an EPSRC Interdisciplinary Research Centre to create a new generation of early-warning sensing systems to diagnose, monitor & prevent the spread of infectious diseases. This large scale collaboration will bring together scientists, engineers and computer scientists from University College London, Imperial College, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Newcastle together with NHS stakeholders, the Health Protection Agency and industry partners. Working across and beyond traditional research boundaries, the IRC will pioneer innovative nano-enabled mobile diagnostic tests which can be used in GP surgeries, community settings and developing countries, linked to smart digital-surveillance systems which search for information on the web to detect early indicators of diseases. The tremendous expansion in mobile phone technology with an estimated 6 billion users worldwide, provides new opportunities for point-of-care diagnostics with inbuilt capacity to securely transmit results to public healthcare systems. The challenge is to create robust multimarker sensor platforms that can diagnose early infections with high sensitivity and specificity. Our strategy will seamlessly integrate the scientific excellence underpinning recent breakthroughs by our team in diverse areas of biomarker discovery, capture coatings, nanoparticles, nanopatterning, sensor systems, wireless connectivity, data mining and health economic analysis of diagnostics. Moreover we will explore innovative new strategies to search for early indicators of infection (herein we coin the phrase "e-markers") by searching through millions of web-accessible information sources including Google, Facebook and Twitter to identify outbreaks even from people who do not attend clinics or from geographical regions that are invisible to traditional public health efforts. By providing doctors, community workers and public health organisations with real-time, geographically-linked information about emerging infections which will be visualised on a "dashboard" display, we will support more rapid, stratified, integrated evidence-based interventions, benefitting individuals and populations.Our disruptive early warning sensing capabilities will bring major human and economic benefits to the NHS and global healthcare systems. The ultimate beneficiaries will be patients since early diagnosis will empower them to gain faster access to better treatments, helping to reduce suffering and risk of death. Society will benefit by preventing the onwards spread of infection by people who are unaware of their infection and preserve the effectiveness of precious antimicrobial medicines for future generations. The NHS and healthcare systems will benefit by simplifying patient pathways allowing tests and results to be given in a single visit and so provide a more cost-effective solution of community based care. Our technologies will also provide new commercial opportunities for British industry.