TyphiNET – unlocking public health lab data on travel-associated typhoid for sentinel surveillance

Our goal is to facilitate the sharing and re-use of pathogen genomic surveillance data by public health reference laboratories to benefit global public health, using typhoid fever as the exemplar. The pathogen genome data now being generated routinely from infection cases in travellers returning to high-income countries from disease-endemic areas could be highly informative for disease control, but this potential is currently not being realised due to practical and resourcing issues around the release of valuable travel information alongside the sequence data.

Our primary strategy is to lower some of the practical barriers to sharing genome data and travel data for public laboratories through development of software to make the process easier requiring fewer person-hours and resources. We also aim to put this data to use by developing a platform for collating and interacting with typhoid genomic surveillance data (TyphiNET), which demonstrates the use of such data for public health and encourages more public health laboratories to participate.

Our longer term vision is that, through lowering the bar to participate in open data sharing and demonstrating the wider benefits of such activities using the examplar of typhoid fever (which is currently the target of new vaccines in many disease-endemic countries), this project will have a wider impact on increasing the number of public health laboratories that share their pathogen genome data and epidemiologically relevant metadata.