Three faculty teams have been selected as the first recipients of awards from the Notre Dame Biothreat Surveillance, Containment, & Operational Preparedness Engine (ND-BIOSCOPE) Accelerator Fund, which fosters and further develops Notre Dame’s expertise in biothreat detection, surveillance, and countermeasure development.
A cross-disciplinary initiative of the Berthiaume Institute for Precision Health (BIPH), ND Sensor Initiative (NDSI), the Warren Center for Drug Discovery, and Remote Emerging Disease Intelligence Network (REDI-NET), ND-BIOSCOPE aims to build capacity in next-generation sensor technologies, artificial intelligence-driven analytics, biosurveillance networks, and rapid therapeutic countermeasure development pipelines to strengthen global health resilience. Projects supported by the initiative’s Accelerator Fund will enhance Notre Dame’s collaborative research capacity, strengthen translational pipelines, and position the University for sustained leadership and competitiveness in emergent biothreat preparedness.
"ND-BIOSCOPE provides a unifying framework for advancing Notre Dame’s leadership in biothreat surveillance, detection, and response,” said Matthew Webber, ND-BIOSCOPE’s principal investigator and acting director of BIPH. “The Accelerator Fund will not only advance innovative research, but also build durable institutional capacity through collaboration, training, and translation.”
The projects supported in this Accelerator Fund award cycle are described below:
Developing transformative diagnostic systems
Anticipating the next pandemic requires building next-generation platforms for disease monitoring and rapid development of targeted therapeutics. Kyle Bibby, associate chair in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences, will lead a project to design and scale large-library virus monitoring and infection screening platforms in conjunction with Hsueh-Chia Chang, the Bayer Corporation Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Brian Baker, the Coleman Professor of Life Sciences in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.
The team will develop two integrated, high-throughput analytical platforms based on proprietary nanoparticle technology. The first of these two platforms is intended for environmental disease surveillance via wastewater, while the second will provide ultra-sensitive screening and detection of immune signatures of infection and difficult-to-detect latent viruses. Meenal Datta, the Jane Schoelch DeFlorio Collegiate Professor in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, and Yamil Colon, associate professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, will contribute expertise in immune-cell cultures and artificial intelligence, respectively.
Automating real-time outbreak forecasting
Early identification of disease outbreaks is critical for saving lives. Current disease-monitoring platforms are largely retrospective and static, lacking automated analysis that converts incoming data into actionable insight. To bridge this gap, Jason Rohr, the Galla College Professor and chair of the Department of Biological Sciences, will collaborate with Nitesh Chawla, director of the Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society and the Data, AI & Computing Initiative, and Samuel Rund, research assistant professor in the Center for Research Computing (CRC) and affiliate of the Eck Institute for Global Health. Qinghua Zhao, a postdoctoral scholar and disease ecologist within the Department of Biological Sciences and Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society, will support the project.
The team will develop a cloud-based biosurveillance platform aided by AI for real-time pandemic forecasting and health-system alerts. The platform will automatically take in multi-source surveillance and sensor data, generating real-time forecasts of disease trajectories—including outbreak start, peak timing, intensity, and duration. The platform will make outputs visible, while automatically issuing alerts via messaging services once outbreak benchmarks are reached.
Optimizing dual-action antibiotics
As the most common healthcare-associated infection, Clostridioides difficile infection (CDI) is an urgent public health threat, killing seven times more people than the next four most urgent threats combined. While normal, healthy gut conditions limit the flourishing of C. difficile, broad-spectrum antibiotic treatments disrupt normal gut health and permit the germination of the bacteria.
Mayland Chang, research professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, together with Shahriar Mobashery, Navari Family Professor in Life Sciences in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, will pursue the optimization of dual-action antibiotics to halt the recurrence of CDI. The researchers will synthesize dimers of oxadiazoles, a promising class of antibiotics, and evaluate their effectiveness in both preventing C. difficile germination and killing vegetative bacteria cells.
“Spanning advanced computing, diagnostic surveillance, and early-stage drug development, the inaugural Accelerator Award teams highlight the depth of talent on our campus, the breadth of our emerging expertise, and the momentum needed to scale this effort,” said Webber.
ND-BIOSCOPE is also supported by the Notre Dame Bioengineering & Life Sciences Initiative, an effort that aims to advance human health and wellness through interdisciplinary biomedical research and training. To learn more about ND-BIOSCOPE, please visit the BIPH website and the University’s Strategic Framework website.
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