Neglected Tropical Diseases

Elijah Songok of the Kenya Medical Research Institute in Kenya will design and test a fortified school meal product with deworming properties for treating soil transmitted helminths (parasitic worms) among schoolchildren in developing countries. Schoolchildren are most at risk of infection-associated morbidities such as stunting and chronic dysentery. However, current mass drug administration strategies are associated with the development of drug resistance, and may not be sustainable long term.

Bryan Bellaire of Iowa State University in the U.S. will improve the safety and efficacy of therapies for treating filarial diseases caused by parasitic nematodes (worms), which are common in developing countries. Current drugs targeting the parasites are becoming ineffective due to the development of resistance, and antibiotics targeting their resident endosymbiont bacteria Wolbachia, which is essential for parasite survival, require multiple dosing regimens that are hard to maintain.

Sara Lustigman of the New York Blood Center in the U.S. will develop a three-dimensional in vitro culturing system to support the development of infective larvae of parasitic filarial worms through to adulthood. Currently adult filarial worms can only be isolated in limited numbers from infected humans or animals, which precludes high throughput drug screening.

J. Brandon Dixon of the Georgia Institute of Technology in the U.S. will develop a scalable, microfluidic-based model of a human lymphatic vessel to support adult- stage lymphatic filariasis (LF) parasites in vitro. LF parasites cause a range of diseases for which treatment options are limited. By recreating the host environment where the parasites normally reside they can keep them alive for longer periods of time, which is required for developing urgently needed new drugs.

Christoph Grevelding of Justus-Liebig-University in Germany will test the effectiveness of Imatinib, a cancer drug which inhibits kinase activity and cellular changes in cells, to impair and kill parasitic worms which carry Schistosomiasis. If successful, Imatinib could serve as a new drug therapy to fight this chronic disease which affects millions in developing countries.

Julie Dunning Hotopp of University of Maryland in the U.S. seeks to identify genes that have been laterally transferred into filarial nematode worm genomes from Wolbachia. Identifying these genes, could provide drug targets to cure neglected tropical diseases such as lymphatic filariasis and river blindness.

When blood-consuming sand flies transmit leishmaniasis they also inject substances from their saliva into humans that are necessary for small numbers of parasites to establish infection. William Wheat from Colorado State University in the U.S. will test whether a vaccine that neutralizes an important sand fly saliva component (maxadilan) will prevent parasitic infection.

Because Leishmania is transmitted to humans when sand flies feed on humans, Jesus Valenzuela of the National Institutes of Health in the U.S. proposes to develop a novel vaccine against salivary proteins of sand flies with the aim to induce a strong immune response against the parasite.

T. brucei, the parasite that causes sleeping sickness, must continuously swim forward in human blood to evade immune responses. Arthur Günzl of the University of Connecticut Health Center in the U.S. will attempt to develop serum-stable RNA molecules to immobilize the parasite by interrupting the mechanism driving parasite motility.

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 .