Novel low cost diagnostic tools and their impact in Africa

护理点检测对于在全球南方提供卫生和经济可持续性至关重要。我们的项目将首先能够低成本、有效和准确地诊断两种传染病，即疟疾和血吸虫病。这将通过一种新型的非常低成本的纸质诊断方法来实现，该方法能够在多路分析中量化患者样本中感染因子的DNA。该平台将允许同时测量几种疾病，从而提高在通常难以到达的环境中提供保健服务的效率，并确定传染原的种类（例如疟疾），这将向保健专业人员提供可采取行动的信息，其中药物对不同物种具有不同的活性水平，从而有助于减少耐药性的潜在出现/增加。我们已经证明了这些低成本分析的潜力，因为它们既敏感又特异，我们现在希望开发新的工程方法来提高它们的性能（在速度和易用性方面），并证明它们的影响，以便它们可以在乌干达和塞拉利昂以及其他流行国家的农村和城市环境中得到广泛应用。由于这些检测方法敏感且定量，因此它们不仅有可能用于治疗个人，而且有可能用于根除方案，例如《伦敦2020年协定》所倡导的方案，从而能够监测疾病的复发/出现。为了帮助传达重复治疗的价值，我们计划开发基于新型手机成像平台的新参与工具，使患者能够可视化样本中的感染因子，并看到干预的结果（无论是通过药物管理还是物理/文化变化，如获得改善的卫生设施或蚊帐）。我们还建议通过收集合适的、现实的、后勤上可行的指标，以及干预措施的潜在影响（包括资源、健康结果、就业、收入），来衡量我们的新型诊断和成像平台的影响。我们还将把这些数据输入到新开发的参数化经济模型中，以预测特定干预措施可能带来的长期效益。最后，拟议研究的组成部分是一个雄心勃勃的影响计划，其中包括公众参与传染病诊断和STEM以及能力加强。我们还将探索在英国（通过我们的工业合作伙伴）和中低收入国家提供低成本即时诊断技术的途径。我们的目标是探索，通过非营利性的商业规划，我们能否与政府、医院和慈善机构/非政府组织建立正确的互动关系，以测试我们是否能够大规模生产这些设备，这样它们就可以在非洲制造，为非洲制造，由非洲人制造。

Point of care testing is fundamental in delivering health and economic sustainability in the Global South. Our project will enable low cost, effective and accurate diagnosis of, in the first instance, two infectious diseases, namely malaria and schistosomiasis. This will be achieved using a novel very low cost paper diagnostic method that is able to quantify the infectious agent's DNA in a patient sample in a multiplexed assay. The platform will allow the measurement of several diseases at the same time, thereby increasing the efficiency of healthcare provision in often hard to reach settings, as well as establishing the species of the infectious agent (e.g. malaria), which will provide actionable information to healthcare professionals, where drugs have different levels of activity for different species, thus helping in reducing the potential emergence/increase of drug resistance. We have already demonstrated the potential for these low cost assays as being both sensitive and specific and we now wish to develop new engineering approaches to improve their performance (in terms of their speed and ease of use) and evidence their impact so that they can find widespread application in both rural and urban environments in Uganda and Sierra Leone, and other endemic countries. As the assays are sensitive and quantitative, they have the potential to be used not only in the treatment of individuals, but also in eradication programmes, such as those advocated by the London 2020 accord, enabling the surveillance of disease re/emergence. To help communicate the value of repeated treatments, we plan to develop new engagement tools based upon a novel mobile phone imaging platform that enables patients to visualise the infectious agent in a sample, and to see the outcome of interventions (whether these be through drug administration or physical/cultural changes such as access to improved sanitation or bed nets). We also propose to measure the impact of our novel diagnostic and imaging platforms by collection of suitable, realistic, logistically feasible metrics, and the potential impacts (including resources, health outcomes, employment, income) of the interventions. We will also feed these into newly developed and parameterised economic models to predict the long-term benefits specific interventions may have. Finally, integral to the proposed research is an ambitious programme of impact, which includes public engagement over infectious disease diagnosis and STEM and capacity strengthening. We will also explore routes to delivery of the technologies both in the UK, where the provision of low-cost point-of-care diagnostics is of significant interest (through our industrial partners), and in LMICs. Our ambition is to explore whether, through not-for-profit business planning, we can develop the correct interactions with Governments, Hospitals and Charities/NGOs, to test whether we are able to scale the manufacturing of these devices, such that they can be made in Africa, for Africa, by Africans.