Barts Health consultant wins award for helping to detect future pandemics
Barts Health consultant haematologist Dr Suthesh Sivapalaratnam, who has helped develop a system to detect future pandemics with a group of experts, has won the second prize in the Trinity Challenge Prize.
Delivered by The Blood Counts, a consortium of clinicians, scientists and industry expert including Dr Sivapalaratnam, this system has the potential to transform the 3.6 billion Full Blood Count (FBC) tests done globally per year and turn them into a broad disease surveillance network with no need for new procedures or equipment.
FBC is a test to check the types and numbers of cells in your blood, including red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets.
This can help give an indication of your general health, as well as provide important clues about certain health problems you may have including iron deficiency anaemia or vitamin B12 deficiency anaemia, infection, bleeding or clotting disorders.
The machine learning algorithms in The Blood Counts initiative have been able to take the vast number of unused data points per FBC test and see changes that are indicative of disease and have proven they could have been effective at picking up the presence of Covid-19 in the UK.
The Blood Counts solution, developed by Dr Michael Roberts, Senior Research Associate of Applied Mathematics and Dr Nicholas Gleadall, Research Associate at the University of Cambridge uses data from routine blood tests and powerful AI and Machine Learning techniques to provide a “tsunami-like” early warning system for novel disease outbreaks, such as Covid-19.
Dr Sivapalaratnam belonged to a team made up of scientists from the University of Cambridge, NHS Blood and Transplant and University College London who were recognised at the ceremony held on June 25 2021, hosted by Dame Sally Davies, with a funding prize of £1.0 million.
Dr Suthesh Sivapalaratnam said: “It is an honour for the Blood Counts team to receive the prestigious Trinity Challenge award. This will enable us to connect to a powerful global network and work on early pandemics detection based on full blood count data. Barts Health has been one of the three pioneering sites for data collection during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Being one of the biggest trusts in the country and with recent mergers of pathology services, we will be able to provide a wealth of knowledge and data for this project. I am excited to work closely with the other team members to make it a success.”
The Trinity Challenge is open to anyone from around the world who would like to contribute their thinking to any of their challenge categories and any individual or group of individuals can submit an initiative, product or solution to the challenge.
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