Simon Grandjean Lapierre is a trained infectious diseases specialist and medical microbiology physician with previous clinical, laboratory and infection control experience in sub-Saharan African countries. He holds post-doctoral graduate degrees in global health and molecular diagnostics applied mycobacterial diseases. He currently works as a clinical lecturer in Centre Hospitalier de l'Université de Montréal in Canada, and coordinates the tuberculosis research program of Stony Brook University in Madagascar. His research activities focus on the implementation of new point of care and highly fieldable technologies for tuberculosis control.

Niaina Rakotosamimanana is a microbiologist and lab director of the Mycobacterial Unit of the Pasteur Institute of Madagascar in charge of the tuberculosis research program. This includes operational research that evaluates new TB diagnostic tools and drug resistance surveys in collaboration with the National Tuberculosis Control Program (NTCP) of the Malagasy Ministry of Public Health. He is in the steering committee of the international network for data analysis that aims to coordinate NGS data handling and NGS capacity building inside the Pasteur Institute international network that is present in 33 countries worldwide.

Tuberculosis (TB) remains the leading infectious disease killer globally, with 10.4 million new cases in 2016 among which 4.1 million remain undiagnosed. Current approaches to TB control are predicted to fail to meet the World Health Organization objective to eliminate TB by 2030. With the rise of the multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) epidemic, new innovative TB case finding, diagnosis, and control strategies are needed. Our objective is to achieve real-time TB diagnosis at the point of care, comprehensive genotypic drug susceptibility testing, and molecular epidemiology driven interventions in low resource, high burden settings. In April 2018, the Pasteur Institute of Madagascar, University of Oxford’s Modernizing Medical Microbiology group and Stony Brook University’s Global Health Institute launched a prospective pilot project which includes methods development for TB sequencing from sputum, and integration of portable TB DNA sequencing within National TB Program (NTP) clinical infrastructures and in collaboration with clinicians and policymakers.

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