Biosecurity Collaboration Platform

CSIRO's Australian Animal Health Laboratory (AAHL) is a national centre of excellence in disease diagnosis, research and policy advice in animal health. As such it plays a vital role in maintaining Australia's capability to quickly diagnose exotic and emerging animal diseases - collectively known as emergency animal diseases. This is achieved through ongoing research programs to develop the most sensitive, accurate and timely diagnostic tests, which are critical to the success of any eradication campaign in the event of a disease outbreak. One of the key features of AAHL is its high biocontainment facility, containing modern facilities enabling research into a range of pathogens in a highly secure setting.

This project is creating a telecollaboration platform to provide the ability to share documents and a broad range of data, including images and sequence data (pathology and visual records), across the biocontainment barrier both on-site and between external collaborators across Australia and internationally. With this technology the number of people and samples physically crossing the barrier will be minimised, and the processes for managing disease will be better informed by the timely distribution of data.

This work is funded by the National eResearch Architecture Task Force.