Serosurveillance partnership for the Pacific region (SERO-PAC)

This project will support locally led integrated multi-pathogen serosurveillance to strengthen data-informed disease control and elimination in the Pacific region.

Disease control programs currently rely on insensitive data of insufficient resolution. This limits their ability to accurately stratify transmission risk to guide subnational plans and ensure efficient allocation of resources to strengthen disease control. A major challenge is the lack of cost-effective point of care diagnostics and the range of samples required for direct detection of pathogens through molecular techniques. Integrated multi-pathogen serosurveillance is a complementary approach that can provide a cost-effective laboratory-based solution to strengthening public health surveillance.

Multi-pathogen serosurveillance is capable of detecting antibodies to multiple pathogens simultaneously enabling an understanding of pathogen exposure, dynamics and providing the ability to monitor the impact of control interventions and vaccination programs and more. The Luminex technology that underpins multi-pathogen serosurveillance can be tailored to include or remove identified priority pathogens and provides an innovative opportunity for integrating disease surveillance across the traditional single disease silos, such that samples collected as part of a malaria survey, for example, can also provide actionable information on population-level exposure to yaws or lymphatic filariasis.

SERO-PAC is a platform through which integrated surveillance can become a sustainable long-term approach to disease monitoring throughout the region. SERO-PAC will create a new approach to understanding patterns of disease through the development and inclusion of regionally identified priority pathogens.

We aim to: