Infectious Disease

Tom Myers of MicroLab Devices in the United Kingdom proposes to develop an electrochemical point-of-care device to provide rapid and accurate diagnosis of malaria and serious bacterial infections in children using a finger-prick blood sample. Integrated diagnosis will allow prompt and accurate treatment and limit needless antibiotic dissemination, which leads to drug resistance.

Daniel Nixon and colleagues at Virginia Commonwealth University in the U.S. will test the theory that gut bacterial flora (microbiome) and nutrition influence inflammation, immune activation, and HIV disease progression. The team will determine whether a safe, inexpensive probiotic bacteria oral supplement can treat an abnormal gut microbiome and attenuate immune system deterioration in HIV-infected Malian women.

Stephen Freedman of The Hospital for Sick Children in Canada will evaluate whether treating children who have gastroenteritis with the anti-nausea and anti-vomiting medication ondansetron could help them better tolerate oral rehydration therapy. Evaluating this treatment in children hospitalized in Pakistan could lead to ways to help children survive potentially deadly infectious episodes when there is no access to intravenous rehydration.

James Beeson and Damien Drew of the Burnet Institute in Australia propose to generate chimeric Plasmodium falciparum that expresses the antigens of another malaria parasite, P. vivax, allowing them to be evaluated as vaccine candidates. Because laboratory culturing of P. vivax is costly and technically difficult, this new method could help accelerate the development of vaccines against malaria caused by P. vivax.

Shengxi Chen of Arizona State University in the U.S. will design and prepare a fluorescent sCD4 protein that changes color when it binds to the HIV pg120 protein. By directly detecting a virus protein instead of antibodies or RNA, which take days to months to accumulate sufficiently to detect, HIV infection can be diagnosed immediately to help prevent the spread of the epidemic.

Paul de Figueiredo and colleagues at Texas A&M University in the U.S. propose to develop a system whereby drugs for defeating new antibiotic-resistant strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis can be developed in the laboratory before these strains emerge in human populations.

Luna Kamau of the Kenya Medical Research Institute in Kenya will investigate how feeding on selected compounds affects male Anopheles mosquito fertility and subsequently, mating competiveness. The compounds could be presented in sugar meals or introduced into larval breeding sites to control mosquito population densities, thereby reducing malaria transmission.

Silvia Vendetti of Istituto Superiore di Sanità in Italy proposes to improve vaccine immunization by transiently accumulating a high number of antigen-specific precursor cells in the lymph nodes at the time of immunization using agents that modulate cell migration as a new vaccine technology platform.

Carlo Montemagno of the University of Cincinnati in the U.S. proposes to develop hollow microcapsules with pores that only form at neutral pH, allowing vaccines in the capsules to be released only after bypassing the acidic stomach environment and arriving at the mucosal tissues of the lower gastrointestinal tract. This new oral vaccine delivery system could allow highly immunogenic vaccines to be administered with increased efficacy and allow for vaccine dose-sparing.

Eva Stoger of the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Austria proposes to engineer edible cereal seeds such as maize and barley to produce recombinant antigens for use in edible multi-component subunit vaccines against infectious diseases. These oral vaccines would employ bioencapsulation to ensure efficient delivery to the gut mucosa.