Health Diagnostics

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 Voigt of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the U.S., along with collaborators Michael Fischbach of the University of California San Francisco and Justin Sonnenburg of Stanford, will engineer a strain of a common bacterial inhabitant of the human gut to contain genetic sensors that can report biomarkers for intestinal disorders in a stool sample.

Virginia Cornish and Nili Ostrov at Columbia University in the U.S. propose to engineer baker's yeast to produce the red tomato pigment lycopene when exposed to the cholera pathogen in drinking water. This safe and simple sensor could be inexpensively manufactured and highly effective for household monitoring of cholera in water by communities at risk for infection.

Mark Styczynski of the Georgia Institute of Technology in the U.S. proposes to create portable, low-cost, bacteria-based genetic circuits to measure blood micronutrient levels without requiring sophisticated instrumentation to perform or read the test. This would provide an inexpensive, rapid method to diagnose nutrition status in the field.

Sergio Botero of Rockefeller University in the U.S. will build and test a library of yeast cells that express olfactory receptors encoded with a reporter gene that can react to various metabolic and infectious diseases. Such yeast cells could be used in a diagnostics platform to detect multiple diseases at a time.

Scott Jordan Kerns of Harvard Medical School in the U.S. will develop a cell-based model of environmental enteric dysfunction, which causes substantial morbidity and mortality in developing countries. As a living model of the human intestine, he will use a gut-on-a-chip device composed of two microfluidic channels enclosing gut cells growing on a flexible membrane, which is coated with extracellular matrix proteins and other cell types.

Carson Meredith from Georgia Tech in the U.S. will determine whether pollen can measure gut function by assessing mucus qualities, which vary along the gastrointestinal tract particularly in children with enteric diseases. Gastrointestinal mucus prevents pathogens entering the body and promotes the absorption of nutrients and medicines. Therefore, its physical properties are relevant for gut health and the development of effective treatments. Pollen particles vary widely in size and shape, and can survive the harsh environment of the gastrointestinal tract.

Andrew Shennan and colleagues at Kings College London in the United Kingdom will field test in rural Ethiopia, Tanzania and Zimbabwe a new blood pressure monitor which uses solar power and requires little training for its ability to increase detection rates and improve outcomes of women with preeclampsia in these communities. In Phase I they performed a feasibility study by introducing a selected and validated blood pressure monitor into low resource rural clinics in Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, and providing basic training.

Guiying Nie and colleagues of Prince Henry's Institute of Medical Research in Australia will test the utility of measuring blood levels of the HtrA3 protein for the early diagnosis of preeclampsia, which is a serious disorder of human pregnancy. Early diagnosis would enable therapeutic intervention helping to avoid premature delivery and associated risks. In Phase I, they developed a high-throughput assay to detect HtrA3 levels in the blood, and evaluated its ability to identify pregnancies at high risk of preeclampsia using a small number of samples.

Irina Buhimschi of Yale University in the U.S. will optimize for developing world use a simple diagnostic urine test that uses the synthetic dye "Congo Red" to stain misfolded proteins that have been recently found to be excreted in the urine of women either suffering from or at high risk for preeclampsia. Identifying these proteins could lead to earlier treatment and lower rates of maternal deaths.