TTC receives an ‘honourable’ mention

PODD, the grand prize winner of The Trinity Challenge, was referenced during a debate in the House of Lords (the second chamber in the UK Parliament) on 21 July 2021.

The app, referred to by Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford during the discussion, is one of the solutions that has gained global visibility through its participation in our inaugural Challenge.

PODD was awarded £1.3m in pledged prize funding at the Trinity Challenge Awards Ceremony in June this year. Their app, which acts as an early-warning sign of disease spillover from animals to humans, is already in use in Thailand and the team hopes to expand its use to neighbouring regions. The PODD team was hailed for their innovative use of data, analytics and data tools, that are the bedrock of The Trinity Challenge.

Dame Sally Davies is the Executive Chair of The Trinity Challenge and is also the UK’s Special Envoy on AMR. In the House, Lord Bethel singled her out for praise, saying: “I pay particular tribute to the work of Dame Sally Davies on antimicrobial resistance. She has done an enormous amount, particularly through the Trinity Challenge, to raise awareness and bring together Governments, industry and academia on this matter”.

The debate highlighted both the economic cost of the pandemic, as well as the need to urgently (re)consider strategies around pandemic preparedness. It underscores the need to look to novel methods of disease surveillance to enable effective and efficient decision making. The focus is now on interventions that can help us identify, respond to, and recover from infectious diseases, saving both lives and livelihoods.

The G7 Carbis Bay Health Declaration has also emphasised the urgency in developing global solutions to improve health and health security. A key aspect of this lies in cross-border collaborations, and the Declaration includes a commitment to reinforce global surveillance networks and genomic sequencing capacity and support for reforming and strengthening the World Health Organization (WHO).

As home to two-thirds of the world’s pharmaceutical market, the G7 is well-placed to lead global efforts in pandemic prevention. The four coronavirus vaccines licenced for use in the UK were all developed in G7 nations (the UK, US and Germany).