Becker's Clinical Quality & Infection Control

6 INFECTION CONTROL & PATIENT SAFETY Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation partner to detect infectious disease spread By Jessica Kim Cohen T he Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub on Oct. 16 unveiled the so launch of an analytics platform to surveil infectious dis- eases, rolled out with the support of another technology billionaire's philanthropy: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Joseph DeRisi, PhD, co-president of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub and a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at UC San Francisco, revealed details of the cloud-based platform, dubbed IDseq, during the Gates Grand Challenges meeting in Berlin. e Chan Zuckerberg Biohub is a collaborative effort between UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco and Stanford (Calif.) University funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan, MD. Dr. Chan and Mr. Zuckerberg launched their other philan- thropy, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, in 2015 with the mission to cure, prevent or manage all diseases by the end of the century. In September, Mr. Zuckerberg said he planned to sell $13 billion in Facebook stock to fund the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. IDseq, which began as a research project in Dr. DeRisi's lab at UCSF, can rapidly comb through terabytes — or 1,000 gigabytes — of metagenomic data to detect disease-caus- ing pathogens from bacteria, virus, fungus or parasite samples. Dr. DeRisi hopes that by revealing trends in global pathogen distribution, IDseq will be able to help re- searchers respond to and manage infectious disease outbreaks. "Pathogens don't respect geographic borders," Dr. DeRisi said in a news release. "e global health community needs the ability to share data quickly to track outbreaks or emerging diseases. With IDseq, we hope to empower data-driven decisions about how to better manage antibiotics, where to prioritize immu- nization campaigns [and] how to shape vector control and surveillance efforts." rough an ongoing pilot project and partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, researchers have already used IDseq to identify an unknown infection at a hospital in Bangladesh as a mosquito-borne viral disease called chikungunya. Now, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is expanding the pilot by offering other clinics and labs worldwide funding for next-gener- ation genome sequencers, molecular biology and bioinformatics training, and access to IDseq. ese pilot projects will help the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub continue their work on IDseq, which they hope to one day make available worldwide. "e ultimate vision for IDseq is for it to be a dashboard of real-time pathogen detection around the world," Dr. Chan explained in a news release. "Nothing like this exists — but it could be a major step forward in our ability to cure, prevent or manage all disease. ese are exactly the types of advances we envisioned when we started the Biohub." e Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub plan to make IDseq available to its partner organizations within the next year. As an open-source project, IDseq's soware is already freely available online. n Hospital linens may be source of C. diff outbreaks, study finds By Mackenzie Bean C ommercial laundering processes using industrial detergent and high disinfecting temperatures do not completely eliminate the presence of Clostridium difficile bacteria on hospital sheets, according to a study published in Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology. For the study, researchers assessed bacterial contamina- tion before and after washing sheets naturally or artificially contaminated with C. difficile spores. In one washing pro- cess, researchers inoculated cotton sheets with C. difficile spores and washed them with sterile uncontaminated pieces of fabric using an industrial bleach detergent in a simulated washing extractor cycle. Researchers also assessed spore survival on naturally contaminated bedsheets from C. difficile patients using a healthcare laundry decontamination process outlined by the United Kingdom's National Health System. The sheets were washed with industrial detergent at a high disinfect- ing temperature in a commercial washer before being pressed and dried. Neither washing process eliminated the presence of pathogenic bacteria. The U.K.'s commercial laundry pro- cess only reduced C. difficile spore counts by 40 percent. Researchers concluded current thermal disinfection stan- dards for hospital sheets do not adequately remove C. dif- ficile spores. They said hospital linens could be a source of sporadic C. difficile outbreaks at healthcare facilities. "The findings of this study may explain some sporad- ic outbreaks of C. difficile infections in hospitals from unknown sources, however, further research is required in order to establish the true burden of hospital bed- sheets in such outbreaks," lead author Katie Laird, PhD, head of the Infectious Disease Research Group, School of Pharmacy, at De Montfort University in the U.K., told Science Daily. "Future research will assess the parame- ters required to remove C. difficile spores from textiles during the laundry process." n

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