Project description
Genomic surveillance of typhoid fever
Every year, there are millions of typhoid fever cases in the world. With antimicrobial therapy being the only treatment option, emerging drug resistance must be contained and prevented from spreading to other neighbouring countries. For this purpose, the EU-funded TyphiNET project will employ a genomics epidemiology approach to assist sentinel and endemic areas surveillance for Salmonella typhi. The scope is to obtain information on specific strain prevalence, antimicrobial resistance and regional transmission patterns. TyphiNET will share this data through an open-access publicly available platform, improving disease management and guiding antimicrobial choice.
Objective
Globally there are ~20 million typhoid fever cases per year, resulting in ~200,000 deaths from infection with the causative agent, Salmonella Typhi. Antimicrobial therapy is the mainstay of typhoid fever control, and genomic epidemiology studies have revealed that drug resistance emerging in one country can rapidly spread to other neighbouring countries and intercontinentally. Genomic and phenotypic surveillance for typhoid and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is therefore very important for disease control. TyphiNET aims to develop innovative approaches to bring the benefits of typhoid genomic surveillance to LMICs where the disease is endemic through three main goals: (1) to unlock data from travel-associated typhoid cases in high income countries that are adopting genomics for routine Salmonella surveillance (2) to unlock data from project-based genomic surveillance in endemic areas (beginning with five key collaborative projects across Asia and Africa) and (3) develop an open access publicly available platform for synergising, visualising, and disseminating large scale genomic data sourced from sentinel and endemic area surveillance. Research questions will include inferring genomic epidemiology parameters (prevalence of strain types, resistance to specific antimicrobials, and regional transmission patterns) for different countries/regions using data from sentinel surveillance and from endemic area surveillance; comparison of these to demonstrate the utility of sentinel traveller surveillance for predicting endemic area disease patterns; and comparison of disease dynamics between regions. Outcomes will inform management of both endemic disease in LMICs and travel-associated cases elsewhere, including providing region- and country-specific data to inform empirical antimicrobial choice; and will reveal coverage gaps in endemic area surveillance to be targeted in future studies.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF-EF-ST - Standard EFCoordinator
WC1E 7HT London
United Kingdom