Neglected Tropical Diseases

Nils Pilotte and Steven Williams of Smith College in the U.S. along with Lisa Reimer at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in the United Kingdom are developing a simple and inexpensive approach to monitor diseases caused by parasites that thrive in mosquitos based on detection in mosquito feces. Current approaches for disease surveillance are expensive, insensitive, or labor intensive, and are generally unsuitable for the areas in which they are needed most, including where disease incidence has decreased.

James Tibenderana and colleagues of the Malaria Consortium in the United Kingdom are adapting a "community dialogue" approach to build trust between communities and the health system in Mozambique in order to boost participation in Mass Drug Administration (MDA) programs against neglected tropical diseases. Low participation in MDA programs is thought to be caused by negative local perceptions of these diseases and a limited understanding of the goals of MDAs.

L. David Sibley at Washington University School of Medicine in the U.S. is developing a long-term in vitro intestinal epithelial culture system for the intracellular parasite Cryptosporidium, which causes severe diarrheal disease in both humans and animals, and is refractory to many anti-parasitic drugs. Currently, Cryptosporidium can only be grown in infected calves or in short-term in vitro cultures, which cannot be used for the high-throughput chemical screens needed to identify new drugs.

Joseph Turner of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in the United Kingdom will develop a small animal model of the parasitic disease onchocerciasis, also called river blindness, which is the second leading infectious cause of blindness. Treatment options for filarial infections are currently limited and lack effectiveness. Thus, small animal models of filarial infections are invaluable for preclinical testing of candidate drugs.

Reto Brun (Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute) and Isabel Roditi (University of Bern) in Switzerland seek to identify small molecules that prematurely induce African trypanosomes, which are parasites that cause fatal sleeping sickness, to differentiate into the life stages necessary for transmission of the parasite. Forcing this transformation within the mammalian host could be the basis for new methods to kill trypanosomes, and this concept might be applied to other vector-borne disease .

In the inter-Andean valleys of Peru, there is a neglected illness called Carrion's disease, affecting populations that live in conditions of extreme poverty and with deficient sanitation. Carrion's disease is transmitted to humans through mosquito bites and poses one of the greatest health problems in affected regions of Peru. The illness has two clinical forms: (1) an acute (hematic) phase, known as 'Oroya fever', reporting a mortality of up to 88% in untreated individuals, and (2) a later, eruptive phase, in which the patient develops nodular dermal eruptions known as 'Verruga Peruana'.

PROJECT CREVETTE

With global efforts to eliminate schistosomiasis and soil-transmitted helminthiases by chemotherapy, more suitable diagnostic tests that are relatively simple and rapid to perform, inexpensive, easy to adapt for field use and with throughput potential are needed to support disease control efforts. This project if successful will ensure that cases are detected rapidly and more accurately, efficacy of chemotherapy is evaluated efficiently and more precisely, and epidemiological surveillance of infection is done more reliably in Kenya, an endemic area.

The idea is to stop schistosomiasis (affecting 790 million people) using a combination of chemotherapy and parasite extinction, latter to be accomplished through restoring the population of indigenous freshwater prawns to rural waterways in endemic regions of Africa. These prawns are natural predators of aquatic snails that harbor schistosomiasis. Follow Nicolas Jouanard on Twitter @ProjetCrevette"

We plan to develop a rapid and sensitive nano-immunosensor for the detection of Bilharzia. This will be an innovative nano-kit suitable for rapid, high-throughput screening and analyzing urine samples for Bilharzia.