Noncommunicable Diseases

Acute kidney injury (AKI) is associated with a high risk of death. Majority of the critically ill patients suddenly die due to AKI, Hypovolemic Shock, Septic shock due to unrecognized disorder with no symptoms in early stage.

The team proposes to develop a highly sensitive Point-of-Care bacteria detection kit from small amounts of blood samples (< 1 ml) to identify pathogen in blood. This technique will be used primarily to detect early stage sepsis for neonates where extremely low amounts of bacteria (10-100 per ml) have to be detected. For this purpose, the team will use a novel format of camelid antibody fragments that have a simple structure, are stable and specially engineered to have a high specificity, affinity and avidity.

The scope of the project proposed by Prof Bikramjit Basu, Professor, Laboratory for Biomaterials, Material Research Centre, Indian Institute of Science, is to develop "Novel alloplastic neo-bladder for bladder replacement in patients with bladder cancer". The team aims to design and develop a non-degradable, non-absorptive, inert and cost-effective synthetic biomaterial, which can replace the use of the intestine as an alternative for urinary diversions, applicable in case of bladder cancer. This work will be done in collaboration with Dr. Anil Mandhanj frpm Medanta.

The scope of the project is to develop a novel, cost-effective, transdermal multi-micronutrient delivery system as a lotion or a similar, an everyday used item in rural and urban population, thus giving it a unique positioning advantage to enable effective and efficient delivery to the last mile – end user. The final outcome is a platform transdermal technology that enables transdermal delivery of multiple actives.

HOPE is a model for cervical cancer screening, recruiting women from the community (HOPE Ladies) to promote knowledge about cervical cancer and self-collection of samples. Testing will be for free in the public sector (low income women), and for high income women we will use marketing strategies and new channels of distribution for the test which will be performed for a fee.

Hasan Uludag of RJH Biosciences in Canada will develop an affordable immunotherapy system based on genome-integrating transposons that works inside the body for the treatment of a wide variety of diseases such as cancer and diabetes. Emerging immunotherapies offer promising treatment for many diseases, but they require genetic modification of immune cells outside the body, and are thus labor intensive and expensive, limiting their utility in developing countries. They will use engineered nanoparticles in a new approach to immunotherapy that modifies immune cells inside the body.

David Mills of the University of California, Davis in the U.S. will determine whether specific plant-based oligosaccharide formulations can drive mixed-culture growth of selected strains of intestinal bacteria for the low-cost and efficient production of live biotherapeutics. Microbial colonization in the human gut is important for overall health. It has been shown that oligosaccharides can provide a food niche to specifically enrich key colonizing bacteria, even in the competitive environment of the human gut.

Ophelia Venturelli of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the U.S. will study the growth kinetics and microbial interactions of a synthetic bacterial community in order to optimize bioreactor design and produce large quantities of mixed cultures at low cost. Mixed microbial populations are used to reconstitute the healthy gut microbiota in infants and children who have suffered malnutrition.

Ahmad Khalil of Boston University in the U.S. will develop a low-cost bioreactor platform to simultaneously optimize growth conditions of multiple bacterial species for large scale production of biotherapeutics. The human gut microbiome plays an essential role in health and development and living microbial biotherapeutics could be an effective treatment in the case of damage by illness or malnutrition. Commercial production is limited by the capacity of bioreactors, which are costly and challenging to scale and relatively inflexible.