Noncommunicable Diseases

Christophe Lacroix of ETH Zürich in Switzerland will develop a new method to grow mixed strains of bacteria in bioreactors more efficiently and at lower cost for producing microbial-based biotherapeutics by immobilizing the bacteria on porous polysaccharide gel beads. Damage to the naturally-occurring bacterial populations in the human gut often occurs as a result of malnutrition and can cause serious illness. Healthy populations may be restored by gut microbial biotherapeutics – the ingestion of mixtures of naturally-occurring gut bacteria.

Gregory Medlock of the University of Virginia in the U.S. will develop a method to predict the optimal combinations of different strains of human gut microbes with health-promoting (probiotic) properties to maximize their yield by fermentation and minimize production costs. Microbes tend to grow better when they are in a mixed population (co-culture) because they can share resources and are more resistant to pathogens. Co-culturing can also lower production costs.

Carol Sze Ki Lin of the City University of Hong Kong and Srinivas Mettu of the University of Melbourne in Australia will develop a new, low-cost bioreactor system to mimic the human gut and facilitate simultaneous growth of multiple bacterial strains with diverse growth requirements. A healthy mixture of bacteria in the human gut is essential to overall health, and live biotherapeutics could be used to restore this population in infants whose gut microbiota has been damaged by malnutrition.

Paul de Figueiredo and Daniel Alge of Texas A&M University in the U.S. will develop a portable, disposable bioreactor for the low-cost production of gut microbial biotherapeutics at an estimated $0.09 per dose in low-resource settings. Dysfunction of the human gut microbiome is a common consequence of malnutrition in poor countries. It may be effectively treated with live biotherapeutics, yet current production methods are complicated and expensive.

Caroline Stefani of the Benaroya Research Institute at Virginia Mason and Yongxing (Leon) Zhao of Carnegie Mellon University both in the U.S. will build an imaging platform combining expansion microbiology and confocal virtual reality to visualize complex host-pathogen interactions in infected tissues to help develop new diagnostics and therapeutics. It is the molecular interactions between the host and the pathogen, both in tissues and inside cells, that ultimately dictate whether an infection takes hold or is destroyed. Identifying these interactions could help develop new treatments.

Worldwide, 50M people suffer from fluorosis, which affects teeth, bones, joints, and brain functions. In countries where manual labour is essential, fluorosis reduces mobility and thus affects livelihoods. In Sub-Saharan Africa, widespread malnutrition is compounded by fluorosis. 14M Ethiopians have fluorosis but defluoridation requires costly infrastructure. Diets rich in calcium (Ca) may reduce the severity of symptoms by binding fluoride (F). No attempt has been made to confirm this effect at the community level.

Bangladesh has about 5,400 garment factories with 4 million workers and up to 16 million livelihoods dependent on it directly or indirectly. 70% of these workers are reproductive-age women, who have almost no access to healthcare. They work 6 days a week for long hours. Many factories are located in the urban areas, which further complicates the situation of these disadvantaged people as there is no effective urban healthcare system for the underserved people in the urban areas in Bangladesh.

Every year more than 6000 (1.3%) babies are born in Ukraine with congenital heart disease (CHD). The current CHD detection approach is based on ultrasound diagnostics which in Ukraine is not available in the majority of hospitals due to both the lack of experience from healthcare professionals and a high cost of ultrasound machines. This project aims at developing a simple-to-use cloud-based medical software which will provide an objective support in clinical decision making by analyzing heart sounds captured by means of electronic stethoscopes soon after birth.

Cervical cancer is the leading cause of female cancer-related death in Haiti. Yet, Haiti currently lacks sufficient screening in women of reproductive age. Innovating Health International (IHI) seeks to implement a system of point of care screening with vaginal HPV testing in which positive results are treated with visual inspection with ascetic acid (VIA)/cryotherapy. The private-sector based service delivery model will allow women to receive cervical cancer screening and education directly where they work.

Chaupadi, a practice in remote Nepal that forces menstruating women to inhabit cramped sheds away from their home, is a form of structural violence. While outlawed, the practice continues, leaving young women vulnerable to infections, asphyxiation, burns, & snake bites. In the last year alone, two young women died from Chaupadi where we work in Far Western Nepal. Chaupadi perpetuates the inferior status of females and reinforces other insidious practices like son preference.