Mission
The mission of the New Diagnostics Working Group is to provide a coordination and communication platform for stakeholders, in order to facilitate their common work towards the development and adoption of new diagnostic tools for tuberculosis.
History
The New Diagnostics Working Group (NDWG) was established in 2001 as a platform with focus on promoting development and adoption of new and modified diagnostic products. Since then, the NDWG Secretariat, the Chairs, and all the members of the NDWG have contributed significantly to the advances in the field of TB diagnostics. Promising technologies have been screened and a series of new product developments initiated, supported, subjected to field trials and ultimately endorsed by WHO for roll-out in endemic settings.
Concurrently, tools such as the WHO/TDR TB specimen and strain banks were developed to better assist researchers and enable such developments as well as to assist in validating their potential future public health impact (mathematical modeling).
Because of the enormous increase in the range, speed and intensity of diagnostic development for TB, the current NDWG’s diagnostics pipeline is the largest that has ever been.
This has made it a priority for the NDWG to produce a scientific blueprint for the development of TB diagnostics that clearly lays out the development and evaluation stages in the value chain of new diagnostics, leading to global implementation. Another priority is to define criteria to place developing diagnostic technologies within this value chain and describe an expanded diagnostic pipeline that reflects the advances in TB diagnostics development.
Structure
The Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) is the lead agency, with Dr Giorgio Roscigno CEO of FIND being one of the co-chairs of the Working Group. Recently a second co-chair has been elected in the person of Dr Madhukar Pai from McGill University, Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics. The Secretariat is housed by FIND with Alessandra Varga.
A Core Group, with representation from major constituencies from academia, industry, NGOs, diagnostic developers and the patient community, together with six Subgroups are supporting the Working Group. In order to ensure ideal collaboration and interaction, the Subgropus have recently been reorganized into a matrix structure involving three technical platforms and three cross-cutting themes.