Biological Preparedness and Resilience through Evolution and Innovation of Laboratories
BioPrevail is a Health Security Innovation Initiative for Sustainable Laboratories
Diagnostic laboratories play a critical role in global efforts to prevent, detect and respond to infectious disease outbreaks. To date the adaptability of laboratories for sustainable operation in low-resource environments remains challenging.
BioPrevail aims to generate innovative solutions for labs suited to the distinct requirements and conditions, with the objective of meaningfully and sustainably strengthening global health security.
For too long, too little has been done. Let’s tackle the challenge together with new approaches for innovative outcomes.
A neglected vulnerability of global health security
- The COVID-19 pandemic, which claimed millions of lives and cost the global economy more than $12.5 trillion, highlighted the international community’s vulnerability to outbreaks of infectious disease.
- Well-functioning, reliable and efficient diagnostic laboratories play a key role in the global campaign to prevent, detect, and respond to pandemics and other natural, accidental, and deliberate disease threats. However, inefficiency of such facilities in many parts of the world undermines global health security.
- Laboratory design is a leading contributor to this problem, as high containment diagnostic laboratories were designed for high income countries and are therefore often too complex, too expensive and insufficiently adaptable to be sustained, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
Old problems demand new solutions
- Laboratory sustainability in LMICs faces many complex challenges, including organisational (e.g. inappropriate facility design, poor equipment maintenance) technical (e.g., unreliable access to power, lack of trained engineers and technicians) and financial (e.g. insufficient O&M budgets) barriers.
- The lab sustainability challenge is not new. For decades, external partners have been working with LMICs to improve lab capacity, often providing infrastructure and equipment similar to that used in high-income countries. Whilst well-intentioned, this approach is often not well-suited to the operational, technological, environmental and budgetary challenges in low resource settings
- As a result, many laboratory facilities in LMICs are unable to meet their core objectives, posing threats to national, regional, and global health security.
- To change the outcome, it is necessary to change the approach to health-security capacity building and to pioneer a new type of laboratory biocontainment facility. Such a facility will be designed in full partnership with LMIC stakeholders and be capable of meeting all the requirements of the end-users in these countries without compromising safety or security.
A call to action
- This new initiative, which builds on more than a decade of analysis and consultation with LMIC stakeholders, aims to reimagine laboratory lab infrastructure and to discover and deliver a new type of diagnostic lab that is purpose design for operation and maintenance in low-resource environments.
- A new model for sustainable laboratories in low-resource environments promises to accelerate implementation of the IHRs and WOAH’s International Standards, support the objectives of the GHSA and eventual pandemic instrument and reinforce other global health security priorities.
- Join us in this ambitious but attainable multi-sectoral effort to address the structural deficiencies, inequalities and global health security threats that are inherent in or a product of unsustainable diagnostic laboratories in LMICs. Different outcomes demand new approaches. THE TIME TO ACT IS NOW.
