Neglected Tropical Diseases

Tayyaba Hasan of Harvard University in the U.S. will work to design a conjugate which will attach to the GP63 enzyme of the Leishmania parasite. This therapy will consist of a lightactivatable, non-toxic chemical that will be activated by a light source, killing the parasite but leaving surrounding cells intact.

Vandana Patravale of the Institute of Chemical Technology in India will develop a sub-unit nanovaccine using green technology against brucellosis, a zoonotic disease which is endemic in sub-Saharan West Africa. The vaccine will be developed for non-invasive intranasal administration and the investigators will study vaccine delivery and its ability to induce a strong protective immune response against Brucella in mice, with a view to future clinical testing in humans.

George Warimwe of the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom will develop a vaccine to protect a variety of species, including humans, sheep and cattle, against Rift Valley fever, which can cause serious illness. Current vaccines that are in development have safety concerns for use in humans. They have developed a Rift Valley fever vaccine using a replication-deficient simian adenovirus as a safe vector that is easy and inexpensive to manufacture, and have tested its safety and immunogenicity in mice, and begun field-testing in sheep in Kenya.

Jean-Pierre Scheerlinck of the University of Melbourne in Australia will develop an effective vaccine against the parasite Theileria parva, which causes East Coast Fever in cattle, by conjugating parasite lysates to nanobeads, which act as an adjuvant to induce a strong immune response. Upon infection, the parasite enters cells of the immune system making classical vaccination strategies that induce antibody responses ineffective. Protecting these animals against infection instead requires a cytotoxic T cell immune response.

Daniel Rock of the University of Illinois in the U.S. will develop a multivalent vector vaccine from the ubiquitous Orf virus that can protect ruminants from multiple diseases with a single dose. Current vaccines for a variety of animal diseases that cause substantial economic costs in the developing world are expensive and require multiple doses. The Orf virus has a wide host range, induces robust and long-lasting antiviral immunity, and can be extensively modified to express antigens from a variety of viruses.

Thumbi Mwangi of Washington State University in the U.S. will work at the Kenya Medical Research Institute in Kenya to test whether treatment of parasitic helminth infections reduces the severity of the co-occurring parasitic diseases malaria and East Coast Fever (ECF) in humans and cattle respectively, which are more difficult to treat. In many developing countries, humans carry more than one parasitic disease, but if and how they interact to affect disease impact, for example by modifying the immune response, is not well understood.

Njayou Ngapagna Arouna of the Université des Montagnes in Cameroon will identify chemical blends to effectively repel tsetse flies, which transmit Human African Trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness), as an environmentally friendly method of disease control. Chemical blends released from porous material hung around the necks of cattle in sub-Saharan Africa can protect them from Animal African Trypanosomiasis (nagana), which is also transmitted by tsetse flies.

Darren Zhu of Synbiosys, LLC in the U.S. aims to produce a low-cost diagnostic platform that can rapidly diagnose leishmaniasis in field conditions. He will engineer a bacterium with cell surface receptors that are activated and amplified by the presence of Leishmania proteases to produce a colorimetric readout. This biologic system could be extended to the rapid diagnosis of other infectious diseases.

Christopher Huston of the University of Vermont in the U.S. will use a calf model to develop effective treatments for the intestinal parasite Cryptosporidium, which causes severe diarrhoea in both humans and animals. Cryptosporidiosis can be life threatening, and current treatments are ineffective. They have performed a cell- based screen of existing human drugs and identified candidates for treating Cryptosporidiosis that need testing in preclinical animal models.

Timothy Geary at McGill University in Canada proposed screening chemicals derived from the biological diversity found in Africa to identify lead compounds for the development of drugs to treat infections caused by parasitic nematode worms. In this project's Phase I research, Dr. Geary established drug discovery centers at the Universities of Botswana and Cape Town, South Africa to screen for compounds that target a nematode family of peptidergic G Protein-coupled receptors. In Phase II, the team is expanding the screening efforts.