MicrobeScope: Innovating advanced, locally sustainable bioimaging technology for infectious disease research in disease-endemic settings in Africa

Initiatives to provide wider access to bioimaging in low-resource settings have focused primarily on regional centres of excellence, with an additional tendency to prioritize deployment of specialist commercial instruments that most scientists located in low- and middle-income countries cannot afford to purchase or maintain, and which limit the scope of applications. Furthermore, since training and networking opportunities are necessarily restricted to the same instruments, even those scientists with a strong interest in bioimaging tend to obtain a narrow practical knowledge of imaging capabilities without being able to integrate advanced technologies and techniques into their own research. These constraints on adaptability prevent meaningful, sustained incorporation of bioimaging instrumentation as standard research tool. The consequent paradox – that the same low-resource regions which suffer the highest burdens of infectious and non-communicable diseases enjoy scarce deployment of appropriate advanced research technologies – provided the motivation for microbeScopes. Building on our openScopes Africa platform (www.openScopes.com), we will develop advanced yet affordable, locally sustainable, modular bioimaging instrumentation that can be deployed at scale across Africa to address a broad range of discovery research questions. Utilizing openScopes instrumentation, the pilot phase will focus initially on the detection of tuberculosis as model bacterial infectious disease. In the scale-up phase, we will expand the scope to region-relevant neglected tropical diseases of bacterial origin such as yaws, trachoma, and Buruli ulcer. Our aim is to stimulate a scientific ecosystem in which both observational and mechanistic studies are supported towards advancing African investigator-led discovery science addressing prevalent public health threats.