Neglected Tropical Diseases

Project intends to identify highly specific, and tandem repeats in the genomes of W. bancrofti, B. malayii, B. timori, and other human filarial agents, to develop a field-deployable, diagnostically robust molecular Point-of-Care test for Lymphatic Filariasis detection.

Project intends to discover high affinity and specific ligands called suprabodies as the biomarkers of Lymphatic Filariasis.

Project intends to capture the images of blood samples for diagnosis of Lymphatic Filariasis and applying customized machine learning algorithms for quantification and classification of Lymphatic Filariasis.

Andrew Greenhill of Federation University Australia in Australia, along with partners at the Papua New Guinea Institute of Medical Research, will use advanced environmental microbiology methods to study microbial community dynamics associated with survival of the typhoid fever-causing bacterium Salmonella Typhi in aquatic environments in Papua New Guinea. "Typhoid Mary" Mallon was an Irish-American cook, written into infectious disease folklore as the first asymptomatic carrier of S. Typhi.

Jason Andrews of Stanford University in the U.S. will study the association between the typhoid fever-causing bacterium Salmonella Typhi and its bacteriophage in both aquatic environments and the human gastrointestinal tract to see if they influence geographic and seasonal disease outbreaks in Bangladesh. The ecology and evolution of many know bacterial pathogens including V. cholerae are affected by the viruses (bacteriophage) that infect them. Indeed, seasonal cholera epidemics are inversely correlated with phage prevalence in water.

Windy Tanner, formerly at the University of Utah and now at Yale University in the U.S., together with Jim VanDerslice of the University of Utah and colleagues from Mehran University of Engineering and Technology in Pakistan, will analyze water samples to determine the conditions that promote the survival of the typhoid fever causing bacterium Salmonella Typhi, and they will use metagenomic deconvolution to identify any gene exchange from other microbial species that may produce drug-resistant strains. S.

Dilip Abraham of Christian Medical College in India will analyze water samples from peri-urban and rural areas in India to study whether and how the typhoid fever-causing bacterium S. Typhi survives by living inside the common amoebae, Acanthamoeba. Acanthamoeba spp. are known to internalize S. Typhi, and may provide an intracellular environmental niche and extend survival of the bacteria. They will collect samples from drinking water sources and sewage lines in peri-urban and rural sites in Southern India.

Denise Monack of Stanford University in the U.S. will use a genetic approach to identify the molecular mechanisms that enable the typhoid fever-causing bacterium S. Typhi to survive in aquatic environments and to rapidly adapt to transmission to humans. Annually, S. Typhi causes over 20 million infections and 200,000 deaths, mostly among populations that lack access to clean drinking water. Understanding how S. Typhi persists in water and then quickly adapts to its human host is critical for controlling transmission.

Robert Kingsley of the Quadram Institute Bioscience in the United Kingdom will locate the typhoid fever-causing bacteria S. Typhi in water reservoirs in Harare, Zimbabwe, and identify any associated protozoa species present in the water that may be supporting disease spread. Typhoid fever is endemic in Zimbabwe, with several major outbreaks reported in the last decade. The bacteria persist in unclean aquatic environments, possibly supported by protozoa, and are transmitted to humans through ingestion of contaminated drinking water. They will detect S.

Aaron Jenkins of the University of Sydney in Australia will combine genomics approaches with physical chemistry to identify the organisms and environmental factors in riverbeds that support the survival and spread of the bacterium, Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi, which causes typhoid. Aquatic environments are a major reservoir of typhoid, but how the bacteria survive in these conditions is unclear, making it difficult to prevent the disease spreading to humans. They hypothesize that S.