The One Health Surveillance platform (OHS) at the Helmholtz Institute for One Health (HIOH) aims at establishing longitudinal surveillance at ecosystem scales in the region of the Taï National Park, Côte d’Ivoire and in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany. The OHS will implement ambitious sampling schemes at human/domestic/wildlife interfaces that will allow researchers to decipher the temporal dynamics of pathogen transmission within and between host species and to identify the determinants of outbreaks, spill-overs and changing distributions of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in complex landscapes .Diagnostic methods are a critical component of any surveillance system. Their development usually focuses on maximizing specificity and sensitivity, which often leads to restricted detection capabilities (e.g. single or small groups of pathogens), low throughput and difficult deployment in low-resource settings While these limitations are offset by the benefits of diagnostic accuracy in the context of advanced public health systems, they are ill adapted to ecosystem-oriented research, where the collection of large bodies of data is crucial to characterize ecological processes. Innovative high-throughput technologies can help overcome this challenge. In this proposal, we offer to lever and combine three technologies to assemble a comprehensive diagnostic pipeline, tailored to the needs of the OHS.

The project includes 4 work packages, with workpackage 3 (WP 3) mainly located at INNT (in cooperation with IFI). The objective of WP3 is to develop a multiplex assay that can detect simultaneously specific antibodies against important pathogens and to establish a comprehensive serological surveillance system in Germany and African partner countries. For this purpose, the Luminex system will be used to build up a serological surveillance application, which facilitates accurate detection and quantification of specific antibodies in humans and animals. The assay is robust and allows the simultaneous detection of antibodies to multiple antigens using only a small sample volume in a high-throughput format.

Involved FLI Scientists

Dr. Martin Eiden (INNT)
PD Dr. Anne Balkema-Buschmann (INNT)
Prof. Dr. Martin H. Groschup (INNT)
Prof. Dr. Anica Dorhoi (IFI)