Malaria

David Sullivan of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the U.S., along with Martin N. Martinov of Gradient Biomodeling LLC, will create a quantum physics computer model of liver-stage malaria parasite infection to screen existing commercial drug and compound databases to identify molecules that possess liver-stage specific anti-malarial activity. Those molecules will then be tested in vivo and in vitro, and the ones that are effective will be optimized via computer modeling for future pre-clinical development.

Robert Gerbasi of the Naval Medical Research Center in the U.S. seeks to identify malaria peptide antigens that present themselves on the surface of infected liver cells for use in the development of new malaria vaccines.

Bart Faber of the Biomedical Primate Research Centre in the Netherlands will attempt to create a malaria vaccine using artificial merozoites, which are the blood stage form of the disease. Faber will engineer yeast cells to present multiple surface proteins and measure subsequent antibody production. If successful, this yeast vaccine could be easy to produce and easily transported and stored at ambient temperatures.

Noel Elman of GearJump Technologies in the U.S. will produce a biodegradable device that can be used outdoors for the controlled release of pesticides and mosquito repellants in a defined area. Current methods for reducing malaria transmission by chemically targeting mosquitoes are quite crude and can cause widespread or prolonged exposure of the human population to toxic chemicals.

Laurence Zwiebel of Vanderbilt University in the U.S. will produce a wearable self-powered device containing the compound VUAA known to repel the malaria vector mosquito Anopheles gambiae. This will help to protect individuals from being bitten outdoors. He will optimize volatilization of VUAA compounds, and explore strategies to incorporate selected analogs into wearable materials.

Alexandra Hiscox from Wageningen University in The Netherlands will enhance the effectiveness of outdoor baited traps to attract disease-spreading mosquitoes by combining them with a repellant applied to the outside of houses. In contrast to indoor repellants and insecticide-treated bed nets, this push-pull system targets those outdoor mosquitoes specifically looking to bite humans, and does not use potentially harmful chemicals that can lead to resistance. At a field site in South Africa, they will test whether their system can reduce the entry of mosquitoes into occupied houses.

Molly Duman Scheel of Indiana University in the U.S. will perform a high-throughput screen to identify small interfering (si)RNAs that cause death when ingested by mosquito larvae as a method for reducing malaria transmission. Malaria vector mosquitoes are developing resistance to current larval insecticides, which are used to complement other control strategies such as insecticide-treated nets. They have shown that small RNAs combined with chitosan nanoparticles are ingested by mosquito larvae and can silence their gene targets.

Daniel Swale of Louisiana State University Agricultural Center in the U.S. will develop a trap to attract and kill pregnant Anopheles mosquitoes and their larvae, which transmit malaria. They will identify the best compound for attracting pregnant females based on either the known attractant Cedrol, a sugar-based attractant, or CO2. They will also test whether the larval development inhibitor triflumuron, alone or in combination with a potassium ion channel inhibitor, can be effectively transferred to the traps by mosquitoes from resting chambers, and destroy the residing larvae.

Brandyce St. Laurent of the National Institutes of Health in the U.S. will test whether cow-baited tents can be used to monitor and control disease-causing mosquitoes in the Greater Mekong Subregion. Most Anopheles mosquitoes preferentially bite animals, but they still contribute to malaria transmission in humans, and many bite outdoors, rendering bednets and indoor repellants useless against them. They will produce low-cost tents treated with insecticide, and locally rent cows as bait.

Szabolcs Marka of Columbia University in the U.S. will develop acoustic software to locate mosquito swarms by their sound, thereby allowing elimination of thousands of breeding vector mosquitos that can cause diseases such as malaria. They have already demonstrated that they can acoustically detect a single distant mosquito in a noisy laboratory setting. They will further develop acoustic locator hardware and sensors targeting the common malaria mosquito Anopheles and field-test its performance in locating swarms from several tens of meters.