Infectious Disease

Stephen Trowell from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Australia will develop a highly sensitive low-cost and low-invasive diagnostic test for malaria that detects volatile chemicals in exhaled breath. Malaria is one of the most severe infectious diseases affecting hundreds of millions of people per year. Although several diagnostic tests are available they are relatively complex and expensive suffer from limited sensitivity and all require a sample of blood.

Louis Schofield of James Cook University in Australia will develop a broad-spectrum malaria vaccine that is effective against different life-cycle stages of multiple species of the causative Plasmodium parasite. More than one third of the world's population is at risk of contracting malaria. However developing an effective vaccine is challenging because humans are infected by five quite distinct Plasmodium species.

Jonathan Jackson of Dimagi in the U.S., together with James Faghmous from the Arnhold Institute for Global Health, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, will develop an open platform that combines real-time data on health, climate, and the environment at high resolution, and near real-time satellite data to inform on population density, in order to detect areas containing limited information (cold-spots) on malaria so that control programs can better allocate resources.

Emmanuel Roux of the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development in France will develop a method to standardize malaria datasets from different countries so that they can be used to monitor the disease across borders, which is crucial for elimination. They will co-design domain ontologies with relevant experts to bridge heterogeneities and standardize metadata across existing national surveillance databases, and use generic tools to extract data on individual disease incidence in cross-border areas to build a cross-border database.

Matt Berg of Ona Systems Inc. in the U.S. will develop a map widget that enables data collected by different platforms on different aspects of malaria, such as disease incidence and intervention efforts, to be accurately mapped and therefore more effectively integrated to help eliminate malaria. It is currently difficult to map specific events particularly in rural areas of developing countries, which lack formal addresses. Different groups use different naming schemes when recording disease-relevant data, making them difficult to cross-reference.

Mark Westra and their team at the Akvo Foundation in the Netherlands will build a central data integration platform for malaria that assembles existing data from a variety of sources and enables it to be easily visualized, analyzed, and shared by all types of users. They will build an initial system and test it with a first set of users composed of key groups of stakeholders and users in multiple countries. This will help them gain a detailed understanding of what different users need from such a platform to ensure it becomes a valuable resource for the community.

Isabel Cruz of the University of Illinois at Chicago in the U.S. will build an ontology-based data integration framework that can predict where malaria incidence is likely to increase or decrease in Zimbabwe, to better target elimination efforts. Eliminating malaria requires being able to monitor the changing patterns of infection risk across an entire region, which is affected by multiple factors including the location of health centers, temperature, rainfall, type of landscape, and population distribution.

Pradip Maiti of Immunimed Inc. in Canada will provide passive immunotherapy using chicken-egg-derived polyclonal antibodies against key proteins of the intestinal parasite Cryptosporidium. This orally-administered immunotherapy will prevent the chronic diarrhea and potentially lethal infection caused by this parasite. Treating patients directly with antibodies against a pathogen is quicker than using traditional vaccination methods that induce individuals to make their own antibodies, which takes days to weeks and can also be difficult in malnourished children.

Nick Ruktanonchai of the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom will develop a web-based application to integrate currently disparate data on malaria disease risk, seasonal population dynamics, and past interventions, to identify prioritized areas for elimination efforts. Control programs are currently provided these data independently, making it difficult to know at a given time where elimination efforts would have the highest impact. They will develop the application together with a national malaria elimination program in one country in southern Africa.

Sumiti Vinayak of the University of Georgia in the U.S. will develop a genetic tool to rapidly turn genes off using light in order to study the function of essential genes in the intestinal parasite Cryptosporidium and accelerate drug discovery. Cryptosporidium causes chronic diarrhea and can lead to death in young children. There is currently only one drug available and it is not effective in many patients.