Malaria

Brian Reich of North Carolina State University in the U.S. will develop a software model to measure the risk of local malaria outbreaks in real-time in the Democratic Republic of Congo and identify treatment strategies for control efforts to more effectively allocate their limited resources.

Thomas Churcher of Imperial College London in the United Kingdom will develop an analytical method to more accurately determine the origin of new cases of malaria in regions with low levels of the disease, which is critical for elimination efforts. Current methods are unreliable as there are no standardized criteria and they often rely solely on interviews. They will use routinely collected travel history data and disease maps to develop rigorous methods for estimating whether a case of malaria is either acquired locally or imported from another region.

Kathryn Colborn of University of Colorado Denver in the U.S. will develop a statistical model to predict future outbreaks of malaria and help identify the most effective intervention strategy. Current models can help work out where and why malaria outbreaks occur rather than predicting future outbreaks. They will use supervised machine learning to develop a set of predictive algorithms using available data including weather, demographics, and malaria incidence in children under five years old from Mozambique.

Edward Thomsen of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in the United Kingdom will build an open-source software platform tailored to support efforts to eliminate malaria by amalgamating desirable features from two existing disease data management platforms. The Disease Data Management System (DDMS) is an existing platform that integrates multiple datasets and supports operational decision-making through unique functionality such as automated outbreak alerts.

Arash Shaban-Nejad of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in the U.S. will develop an analytic framework to help integrate dynamic surveillance data from multiple sources and health systems to support decision making for malaria elimination. Data on malaria is currently scattered in different formats across diverse organizations, making it difficult to access and use. An ontology is a web-based method that explicitly defines specific concepts using logical rules and constraints, and can be used to capture and combine information from numerous sources into a formal framework.

Marcos Barreto of Universidade Federal da Bahia in Brazil will build a platform that routinely integrates surveillance data from malaria with socioeconomic and health care data, and also provides open access and support for data analysis and mining. To monitor the spread of malaria in a populous country like Brazil requires an open access surveillance system that can incorporate multiple types of data to support elimination efforts.

Kouichi Hasegawa of the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine in India will develop an assay using human liver cells to study the parasite Plasmodium vivax, which causes malaria, and to screen for new anti-malarial drugs. During the parasitic life cycle inside human hosts, P. vivax infects hepatocytes (liver cells), where it can lie dormant and protected from treatment, leading to disease relapse. To identify new drugs to target this stage of P. vivax requires large numbers of human liver cells, which are difficult to obtain and often unsuitable.

Carmenza Spadafora of Panama's Institute of Advanced Scientific Investigations and High Technology Services and José A. Stoute of Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine in the U.S. investigated whether malaria can be treated by microwave irradiation, an idea based on the unique electromagnetic properties of hemozoin, a metabolite formed by Plasmodium parasites in infected red blood cells. This project's Phase I research demonstrated that malaria parasites inside red blood cells are sensitive to low doses of microwaves that do not harm uninfected red blood cells.

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.