This Grant Opportunity for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) award supports research to advance the national health through research on effective screening strategies to detect asymptomatic infections and genetic diseases. The project has the potential to substantially improve health outcomes, reduce healthcare costs, and diminish the spread of disease by significantly reducing the time and resources required to identify affected individuals. Partnering with the North Carolina State Laboratory of Public Health (NCSLPH), the project investigates pooling strategies for combining individual laboratory samples to measure the concentration of a disease-related marker. Pools that test positive for the disease marker then undergo follow-up testing to identify positive-testing individuals. Pooling is a highly efficient strategy but must be performed carefully so as to control for imperfect medical testing technologies, heterogeneous populations, dilution effects, variable disease progression, and other uncertainties in testing and disease parameters. This project will provide public health agencies with effective strategies to mitigate existing and emerging threats to communities and populations.
This award supports fundamental research in operational methods to design effective and efficient sample-based screening strategies by exploring novel, rigorous approaches to pooled testing using an optimization framework. The framework will incorporate disease (marker) progression models, imperfect tests with continuous outcomes, pooling dilution effects, and demographic variables, including risk-factors, in a realistic manner. The framework will be used to study the effects of non-uniform screening policies, the impact of more accurate but costly test procedures, policy robustness, and measures of equity among screened subpopulations. By deriving structural properties of solutions to the resulting non-convex optimization problems, this research will generate insight and principles on the use of pooling. In collaboration with NCSLPH, pooling strategies will developed, calibrated, and validated for two of the most prevalent sexually-transmitted diseases in the United States. This research will advance the knowledge-base in pooled testing and fill critical voids in the literature, which spans operations research, bio-statistics, and medical decision-making, and in practice. Project discoveries will be broadly disseminated, new course material will be developed, and undergraduate and graduate students will interact with the team through research experiences and mentoring.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
