NC State CVM Invests in First Dry Lab to Support Work on Controlling Disease Spread

Recognizing veterinary medicine’s increasingly important role in safeguarding public health, the NC State College of Veterinary Medicine has created a cutting-edge dry laboratory that will accelerate the work of Dr. Gustavo Machado, an associate professor of emerging and transboundary diseases whose research centers on preventing the spread of deadly diseases among livestock farms.

The lab employs 15 software developers and computer science students, both master’s and Ph.D., and several part-timers who answer help desk calls for Machado’s main focus: the Rapid Access Biosecurity App, a cloud-based computer program he developed that helps state and federal authorities better track and control disease outbreaks among hog, poultry and cattle operations. 

“Dr. Machado’s work really sits at that intersection of animal health and welfare and public health,” says Dr. Joshua Stern, associate dean for research and graduate studies. “You might not think about a veterinary school being deep into computational analyses, but that’s what his team does. We were really excited to help him realize his vision for a space where all of his team could work together to solve big problems in big ways.”

More than 17,000 livestock farms, primarily pork producers, across the country have signed up to participate in RABapp, entering data about animals coming from and going to their operations and creating biosecurity plans. The USDA now requires hog producers to have biosecurity plans to be government-certified as disease-free.

About 75 companies and 36 state Departments of Agriculture — an increase of 12 since December — use the program’s data to help secure the livestock market against devastating outbreaks of diseases, including African swine fever, classical swine fever and influenza A, Machado says. 

A single outbreak of porcine epidemic diarrhea virus, or PEDV, for example, can cost a farm nearly $600,000. North Carolina, the nation’s third-largest pig producer, is a RABapp user.

The number of users and requests for program updates have increased so much since RABapp’s launch in 2019, Machado and his growing team were running out of collaborative space. Stern worked with Machado to create the consolidated lab in the NC State College of Veterinary Medicine Research Building.

“This has expedited our performance,” says Machado, who has a DVM and a Ph.D. in epidemiology. “People can say, ‘I need to talk to this person’ and just go, so now everything moves very fast. We’ve been very happy since we moved there.”

‘That’s How We Evolve’

Work on the RABapp service is continuous because anything computer-related quickly becomes fodder for hackers and antiquated for users, Machado says.

“You can’t just say ‘OK, here it is’ and not touch it and think it’s going to work forever,” he says. “It needs constant updates, constant maintenance. For instance, the cloud-computing service version that we are using today is good only until next September. But that’s how we evolve.”

Jap Ashokbhai Purohit, a master’s student in computer science and engineering at NC State University, has been working with Machado since December. His most recent projects involved developing an alert system that notifies RABapp users when there is disease spread and automating aspects of data-retrieval for researchers.

“I have learned that the involvement of tech in the public health domain and how we can use it to control the virus spread, like we just saw in COVID, is quite fascinating,” he says. “This sort of system for animals has complex layers, but the RABapp simplifies it for the actual users. We’ve made a system that can be used by all users.”

Purohit says he never imagined using his skills within a veterinary college.

“When I saw this particular job where it mentioned virus spread, disease, animals, specific to cattle, swine and poultry, it just hooked me,” he says. “Now I know this kind of system where we can track the spread and then put it into one portal like the professor has built here, it’s important for human well-being.”

Two of the lab’s developers are dedicated to improving computer infrastructure by optimizing loading speeds while reducing costs — a delicate balance for technology enterprises, Machado says. 

“We’re charged by cloud computing platforms by the amount of computing we use, so we try to optimize that,” he says. “You can make it very fast, but then you burn $1,000 a month. So we ask, ‘How can we make it run faster for $200 a month?’ And they work on that.”

Most important to Machado, however, is maintaining the trust that farmers and state agricultural departments have placed in RABapp and its outbreak-controlling and money-saving capacity. His goal is that any help desk request — which can involve password help, Internet speed questions and lost emails, for example — be resolved within 30 minutes.

“We cannot go back,” Machado says. “We cannot walk away because now we have all the trust within the industry, with the states, and I would say that’s what I’m most proud of and also my biggest concern. We cannot lose the trust so that’s why we work so hard.”

This post was originally published in Veterinary Medicine News.