The Centre’s establishment and first three years are anchored by TT ONE LAB+: Strengthening Laboratory Capacity for One Health Surveillance in Support of Pandemic Preparedness, Prevention and Response. Funded by the Pandemic Fund and implemented by PAHO/WHO in partnership with the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Agriculture, Land and Fisheries, the project is building a national One Health laboratory system for Trinidad and Tobago. Within this system the EDGe Centre serves as the academic research and training resource, developing and validating genomic and metagenomic protocols for diagnostics, clinical and environmental surveillance and outbreak investigation, and delivering training.
Current work under TT ONE LAB+ includes:
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Metagenomic approaches for diagnosis and surveillance of viruses causing acute febrile and influenza-like illness
Many viral infections first present as clinically indistinguishable acute febrile illness. Diagnosis can therefore require a series of pathogen-specific tests, and the cause often remains unidentified because no test exists or the detection window is missed. This delays treatment and weakens surveillance. Pathogen-agnostic testing based on metagenomic sequencing offers a single-test alternative. We are evaluating metagenomic approaches against conventional PCR and serological testing in adults presenting to healthcare institutions with acute undifferentiated febrile illness or influenza-like illness.
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Environmental and wastewater genomic surveillance
Pathogens shed into the environment provide an early, population-level signal of disease. We are developing and validating genomic and metagenomic protocols for environmental surveillance, including sewage and wastewater, to complement clinical surveillance and strengthen early warning.
COVID-19 produced dramatically different outcomes in West Africa, the West Indies and West London despite similarities between the populations, including shared genetic ancestry and common vaccines. This Wellcome-funded project of the WWW Consortium brings together three prospective cohort studies of vaccinated adults in Accra, Kingston and London to identify the mechanisms behind these differences. The consortium harmonises the three studies, transfers assay and modelling capacity between sites, and tests four hypotheses on factors that might contribute to differences within and between our cohorts: prior exposure to earlier SARS-CoV-2 variants, exposure to bat and human coronaviruses, exposure to malaria, and differences in inflammatory and immune responses following vaccination.
The Consortium partners are researchers at The Francis Crick Institute, London; West African Centre for Cell Biology of Infectious Pathogens, University of Ghana; London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; The University of the West Indies, Mona; NIHR University College London Hospitals Biomedical Research Centre; and our team at the EDGe Centre, The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine.
Our team at the EDGe Centre are screening local bat populations for coronaviruses so that their spike proteins can be included in pseudovirus neutralization and other assays for cross-reactive immunity across the three cohorts.
Detection and Characterisation of Potential Emerging and Emergent Arboviruses in Mosquitoes in the Caribbean
Mosquito-borne viral diseases have resurged worldwide over recent decades, with viruses and their vectors spreading into new regions and epidemics becoming larger and more frequent, driven by globalisation, the movement of people and animals, and climate change. Pioneering studies in the 1950s and 1960s demonstrated numerous mosquito-borne viruses in human and animal populations in Trinidad and Tobago. Modern sequencing technology now makes it possible to revisit that work and establish which viruses currently circulate in the country’s mosquitoes and whether they pose a risk to animal or public health. The risk is heightened by urbanisation and encroachment into forested areas, and by the movement of people and animals from the neighbouring South American mainland.
We are applying metagenomic sequencing to detect and characterise arboviruses in mosquito populations sampled from forested, forest fringe, urban and livestock farming areas, establishing a baseline of virus diversity and using phylogenetic analysis to infer the evolutionary histories of the viruses found. Our objectives are to identify mosquito-borne viruses in Trinidad and Tobago and determine their distribution relative to human and animal habitation; and to characterise the viruses in circulation and assess the threat they pose to human and animal health.
The study is funded by the USDA and is a collaboration with researcher at their Agricultural Research Service, Foreign Arthropod-Borne Animal Diseases Research Unit, Manhattan, Kansas and the School of Veterinary Medicine, The University of the West Indies , St. Augustine.