The World Health Organization (WHO) Global Tuberculosis Programme has initiated a process to review the evidence on the use of targeted next-generation sequencing technology for the detection of drug resistance among people diagnosed with TB, with the goal of establishing guidelines on their use for clinical care and treatment initiation.
In preparation for the upcoming guideline development group meeting, scheduled for December 2022, there is a need to perform a systematic review of the published and unpublished data on the diagnostic accuracy of this class of technologies. Furthermore, there is a need to conduct quality assessment of the identified evidence (following the GRADE framework), summarize the results in the format of the Evidence table/Evidence-to-decision framework (GRADEpro software 2020), prepare a presentation for the guideline development group, and write a descriptive report detailing the methods and findings of the review.
WHO is seeking expressions of interest from independent researchers, academic institutions or other entities with relevant expertise and experience in systematic review and statistical analysis to perform the systematic review, synthesis and quality assessment of the available data. The candidate entity should be able to work independently as well as interact regularly and collaboratively with the WHO Global TB Programme team, data contributors and other technical experts as required. Please review the terms of reference for details of the work and requirements.
Please submit to the WHO Global TB Programme an expression of interest letter specifying details on the relevant capacity and experience of the candidate in similar type of work on systematic reviews and meta-analyses, together with the resumes of persons to be involved.
Please send your submissions to the WHO Global TB Programme at cmiller@who.int by 13th May 2022. The expressions of interest received will go through a review process and the selected candidate will be notified on completion of the review process. The selected candidate will be required to develop a proposal for the evidence summary to be conducted along with details of a budget estimate to be submitted to the WHO Global TB Programme.