A specialist team — the Diagnostics Accelerator — has been created by UKHSA to rapidly boost the UK’s ability to diagnose and test for new and emerging infectious disease threats, aimed at strengthening the UK’s pandemic preparedness and response.
The Accelerator seeks to improve the speed at which new and existing types of tests such as lateral flow tests (LFDs), molecular point of care tests and polymerase chain reaction tests (PCRs), can be made ready at rapid scale for a wider range of different pathogens.
Work is already underway to identify gaps in the UK’s diagnostic capabilities for notable pathogens within prioritised viral and bacterial families.
UKHSA aims to create new partnerships with industry, academia, non-government organisations (NGOs) and other government bodies to prioritise the development of tests for pathogens with the greatest pandemic and epidemic potential, to ensure the UK has accurate diagnostic tests ready for infectious diseases that pose the greatest risk.
Currently, while UKHSA has developed its own in-house tests for a number of different pathogens including avian influenza and mpox, there is a lack of commercially available tests on the UK market that would allow testing to be ramped up to the levels needed for epidemic and pandemic scenarios for many infectious diseases.
As well as scoping out which tests are suitably adaptable to tackle Pathogen X – an unknown future pathogen with severe pandemic potential – the new, specialist team will also evaluate the efficacy of Mpox lateral flow devices in a pandemic scenario and evaluate different solutions for molecular analysis methods required for diagnosis, pathogen evolution and surveillance.
The Diagnostics Accelerator is led by UKHSA’s Melanie Amphlett. She presented the teams work at our recent IDWP, and BIVDA look forwards to supporting industry and UKHSA to work together effectively.
