̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Sally Davies

Trinity Challenge announces inaugural winners

Anonymous — Fri, 25 Jun 2021 14:43:12 +0000

̽��ֱ��eight winners have been selected by an international panel of expert judges, out of a total of 340 applications from 61 countries. ̽��ֱ��competition has seen unprecedented collaborations between the private, public, charitable and academic sectors, and will drive a step-change in using data and analytics for pandemic preparedness.

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge joined a coalition of some of the world’s leading businesses and academic and tech institutions to launch ̽��ֱ��Trinity Challenge in September 2020. ̽��ֱ��global challenge, convened by Dame Sally Davies, Master of Trinity College, provides a £10m prize fund for breakthrough solutions to make sure one billion more people are better protected against health emergencies.

Participatory One Health Disease Detection (PODD), which empowers farmers to identify and report zoonotic diseases that could potentially pass from animals to humans, has been named the grand prize winner at the inaugural awards ceremony. ̽��ֱ��organisation is being awarded £1.3 million (US$1.8 million) in pledged funding.

Led by Susumpat Patipow, General Director at OpenDream, PODD has developed a platform for livestock owners to report suspected animal illness, and in return receive veterinary care to improve animal health. If it appears a disease outbreak is likely, local health officials will quarantine the sick animals, saving the remaining livestock and possibly preventing the next COVID-19-type outbreak.

Having already achieved significant success in Thailand, with a network of 20,000 farmers helping to detect and control disease outbreaks, PODD is looking to expand its operations to Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Laos, Uganda and Vietnam over the next three years.

BloodCounts! - an international consortium of scientists, led by Professor Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb from Cambridge’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) that has developed an innovative infectious disease outbreak detection system, was one of two second-prize winners, each awarded £1 million in pledged funding.

Developed by Dr Michael Roberts and Dr Nicholas Gleadall, the BloodCounts! Solution uses data from routine blood tests and powerful AI-based techniques to provide a ‘tsunami-like’ early warning system for new disease outbreaks.

“Since the beginning of the pandemic I have been developing AI-based methods to aid in medical decision making for COVID-19 patients, starting with analysis of Chest X-ray data,” said Roberts, who is affiliated with DAMTP and the Cambridge Mathematics of Information in Healthcare (CMIH) Hub. “Echoing the observations made by the clinical teams, we saw profound and unique differences in the medical measurements of infected individuals, particularly in their full blood count data. It is these changes that we can train models to detect at scale.”

Unlike many current test methods, their approach doesn't require any prior knowledge of a specific pathogen to work, instead, they use full blood count data to exploit the pathogen detecting abilities of the human immune system by observing changes in the blood measurements associated with infection.

As the full blood count is the world’s most common medical laboratory test, with over 3.6 billion being performed worldwide each year, the BloodCounts! team can rapidly apply their methods to scan for abnormal changes in the blood cells of large populations - alerting public health agencies to potential outbreaks of pathogen infection.

This solution is a demonstration of how the application of AI-based methods can lead to healthcare benefits. It also highlights the importance of strong collaboration between leading organisations, as the development of these algorithms was only possible due the EpiCov data sharing initiative pioneered by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Hospitals.

“Hundreds of millions of full blood count tests are being performed every day worldwide, and this meant that we could apply our AI methods at population scale,” said Gleadall, from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and NHS Blood and Transplant. “Usually the rich measurement data are discarded after summary results have been reported, but by working with Cambridge ̽��ֱ��, Barts Health London, and ̽��ֱ�� College London NHS Hospitals we have rescued throughout the pandemic the rich data from 2.8 million full blood count tests.”

̽��ֱ��Sentinel Forecasting System is the other second-prize winner, and will explore the emergence of new infectious diseases in West Africa, beginning with Lassa fever. ̽��ֱ��system will combine data from ecology, social science, genomics and epidemiology to provide real-time disease risk for haemorrhagic fevers, such as Lassa and Ebola.

Lassa is a virus usually passed to humans through exposure to food or household items contaminated by infected rats. It is endemic in West African countries including Benin, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Mali, Sierra Leone, Togo and Nigeria.

Around 80% of people who become infected with Lassa virus have no symptoms, and the overall case-fatality rate is 1%. 1 in 5 infections can result in severe disease affecting the liver, spleen and kidneys.

̽��ֱ��UCL team will partner with the African Centre of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases in Nigeria, Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, Zoological Society of London, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Microsoft, and Cambridge’s Laboratory of Viral Zoonotics (LVZ) to produce the system.

“This Trinity Challenge project brings new multidisciplinary technologies together to anticipate climatic, human, animal population, agricultural impacts on the likelihood of spill overs of infections from animals to humans,” said Professor Jonathan Heeney, who leads LVZ at Cambridge’s Department of Veterinary Medicine.

Additionally, five 3rd prize winners are each being awarded £480,000 (US$ 660,000) in pledged funding.

Dame Sally Davies said: “It was crystal clear at the beginning of this pandemic that the world had a lack of data, a lack of access to data, and a lack of interoperability of data, presenting a challenge. While others talked, we took action. ̽��ֱ��solutions we have discovered in the course of the Challenge will be a link between systems and countries.”

In addition to financial support, ̽��ֱ��Trinity Challenge will provide connections to the right organisations to maximise the impact of these solutions. Since its inception nine months ago, TTC has united early applicants with partners from the private, academic and social sectors to receive access to digital platforms, data, and technical advice, to scale-up the use of data and analytics to protect the world from future health emergencies. ̽��ֱ��Trinity Challenge has helped form over 200 connections between applicants and its members.

̽��ֱ��Trinity Challenge has announced the winners of its inaugural competition, and is investing a £5.7 million (US$8 million) charitable pledged prize fund into one grand prize winner, two 2nd prize winners, and five 3rd prize winners.

While others talked, we took action. ̽��ֱ��solutions we have discovered in the course of the Challenge will be a link between systems and countries

Dame Sally Davies

̽��ֱ��Trinity Challenge

Collage of Trinity Challenge finalists

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Cambridge helps launch £10m Trinity Challenge to protect the world against future pandemics

cjb250 — Mon, 14 Sep 2020 07:00:11 +0000

̽��ֱ��Trinity Challenge sets a series of urgent questions to harness the potential of data and analytics to learn and share lessons from the great innovations made to combat COVID-19 and to build resilience against future health emergencies. £10m of funding will be made available to teams to support and scale their innovations across areas including economics, behavioural sciences, and epidemiology.

̽��ֱ��Challenge has been convened by Dame Sally Davies, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Its Founding Members represent a diverse coalition of world leading organisations across the private, public and social sectors. All are united by the common aim of using data and advanced analytics to develop insights and practical actions to contribute to a world better protected from health emergencies.

Launching the Challenge, Dame Sally said: “There will be another COVID-19, and there is an opportunity for the international community to learn lessons now and prepare for the future. ̽��ֱ��Trinity Challenge is a recognition by business, academia and philanthropy of the need for new, breakthrough ideas and approaches to beat the next pandemic.”

̽��ֱ��Challenge has the support of Professor Stephen J Toope, Vice-Chancellor of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, who said: “COVID-19 has highlighted the power of data in helping us understand and tackle health emergencies, but it has also revealed the challenges we face in getting the right data to the right people at the right time.

“We need to up our collaborative game so that we cross sectors, disciplines and borders to help us tackle – and even prevent – future health emergencies. ̽��ֱ��Trinity Challenge is an exciting opportunity to make this happen.”

Professor Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb and Anna Vignoles, co-chairs of the Cambridge Centre for Data-Driven Discovery, will be providing leadership on behalf of the ̽��ֱ��.

Professor Schönlieb said: “Cambridge is supporting ̽��ֱ��Trinity Challenge not only because of our expertise and ability to contribute to tackling this pandemic but also because of our key role in producing the next generation of scientists who will be needed to tackle this and future public health threats of this kind.”

Professor Vignoles added: “Our ̽��ֱ�� is world leading in many aspects of the science needed to tackle this pandemic. We are also world leading in terms of our data science. ̽��ֱ��Cambridge Centre for Data-Driven Discovery convenes data science expertise from right across Cambridge and is highly interdisciplinary in its focus. We have been working closely with ̽��ֱ��Trinity Challenge team to determine what data we need and how we might use it to address this pandemic.”

̽��ֱ��Trinity Challenge is calling on global participants to submit impact-led ideas on how to safeguard our health and economic systems from the threat of global health emergencies. Submissions that make the selection will be supported with access to people, data and resources from Founding Members, to maximise the effectiveness of their solutions and leverage the world-leading expertise and innovation of these institutions.

Challenge Teams will focus on potential solutions that support and strengthen the global public health ecosystem in a robust and inclusive way. Solutions will be fielded globally through an open and accessible submission process to bring the best minds and ideas together with the aim of developing insights that will benefit the world in the future.

̽��ֱ��Founding Members are: Aviva, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Brunswick Group, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, Discovery Limited, Facebook, Global Virome Project, Google, HKUMed, Imperial College London, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Internews, Legal and General, LSE, McKinsey and Company, Microsoft, Northeastern ̽��ֱ��, Optum, Reckitt Benckiser, Tencent, Zenysis Technology.

Full details are available on ̽��ֱ��Trinity Challenge website.

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge has joined a coalition of some of the world’s leading businesses and academic and tech institutions to launch ̽��ֱ��Trinity Challenge. This global challenge provides a £10m prize fund for breakthrough solutions to make sure one billion more people are better protected against health emergencies.

COVID-19 has highlighted the power of data in helping us understand and tackle health emergencies, but it has also revealed the challenges we face in getting the right data to the right people at the right time

Stephen J Toope

Trinity Challenge

Dame Sally Davies and ̽��ֱ��Trinity Challenge

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