TSB-Dengue

Dengue

Almost half of the world’s population, about 4 billion people, live in areas with a risk of dengue. Each year, up to 400 million people get infected with dengue. Approximately 100 million people get sick from infection, and 40,000 die from severe dengue.

Objective

A prospective active syndromic surveillance is planned in collaboration with hospitals in the Delhi-NCR region. The aim is to harness the strength of these collaborations to accomplish an effective surveillance of dengue along with the development of novel diagnostic and surveillance tools.

3 main objectives:

• Mapping of disease burden
• Sequencing of samples
• Developing low-cost diagnostics

Aim and long-term goal

We propose to set up a hospital and lab-based surveillance system where dengue suspected cases can be reported and their serum samples can be analysed in real time setting. 

The long term goals of the proposed project is developing early warning signals, robust surveillance systems, improving local capacity and ensuring that the right diagnostics and treatment are available to all people.

Importance of the Project

This project is a unique model to understand that effective prevention and treatment of dengue is contingent on the effective surveillance for the disease burden and distribution.

Retrospective data analysis will support the building of epidemiological models, identify the most suitable sites for sero-surveillance and guide in the development of molecular diagnostics platform. The molecular tools will allow fast and effective surveillance of dengue and can be made available to all the government and private players involved in dengue surveillance.

This project is a part of Rockefeller Pandemic Prevention Initiative, APSI (Alliance for Pathogen Surveillance Innovations) – India.

What we do

• Analysing the retrospective data
• Sero-surveillance and genome sequencing
• Collaboration to produce molecular diagnostic platforms
• Collaboration for surveillance and early warning signals

Novelty

Ashoka university has recently launched an extensive health science research program with an aim to bring together diverse stakeholders. One of our primary focus, under the broad umbrella of health sciences, is infectious diseases, including dengue.

Through the collaborative efforts we would be able to understand the prevalence of dengue, presence of various serotypes as well as genomic variants of each serotype. Analysis of this retrospective data will be used to develop molecular platforms for clinical as well as environmental (waste-water and mosquito) surveillance.

Our Collaborative Partners

The collaboration between Ashoka University and Max Healthcare aims to build a joint research program on genome as well as data analysis that will include AI, ML and deep learning of various genetic and life-style diseases.

Ashoka University is also exploring the possibility to collaborate on this project with various government funded hospitals in the Delhi NCR region.

Interdisciplinary collaboration within Ashoka

A multidisciplinary team from diverse background are engaged in this project.

	Dr. Shraddha is a research faculty fellow working on public health data science project at Ashoka University. She is implementing the dengue surveillance framework in Delhi-NCR region as a part of Rockefeller Pandemic Prevention Initiative, APSI (Alliance for Pathogen Surveillance Innovations) – India.
	Dr. Rintu Kutum is a faculty fellow at the Department of Computer Science at Ashoka. He is handling the data analytics part of the project.
	Dr. Jaisri Jagannadham is project lead at the Centre for Bioinformatics & Computation Biology. She is focusing on the genomic analysis of various dengue subtypes.

Other team members

1. Abha Tiwari: Project Manager
2. Nazneen Gheewalla: Research Assistant
3. Vasundhara Karthikeyan: Research Assistant

Leadership

Funding source

Rockefeller Foundation grant

“With support from The Rockefeller Foundation, research institutes will be able to support MSMEs to manufacture high quality, yet low-cost molecular diagnostics that meet global standards and enable India to better contribute to the global Covid-19 response.” Prof. K Vijay Raghavan, Ex-Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India