Health Diagnostics

Floriano Silva of Fiocruz in Brazil will develop a drug screening assay using automated microscopy to test new drug candidates for toxicity towards adult helminth parasites, which cause a range of diseases. Current screening approaches cannot easily identify drugs that specifically target adult parasites, which is the most disease-relevant life cycle stage. He will develop and validate imaging and computational methods to automatically monitor physical characteristics of the parasites, and perform proof-of-principle drug screens using an FDA approved and an annotated compound library.

Nils Pilotte and Steven Williams of Smith College in the U.S. along with Lisa Reimer at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in the United Kingdom are developing a simple and inexpensive approach to monitor diseases caused by parasites that thrive in mosquitos based on detection in mosquito feces. Current approaches for disease surveillance are expensive, insensitive, or labor intensive, and are generally unsuitable for the areas in which they are needed most, including where disease incidence has decreased.

Marya Lieberman of the University of Notre Dame in the U.S. will produce an inexpensive paper card that can easily and quickly measure the quality of over 50 common drugs used to treat both humans and animals. Current estimates indicate that 10-30% of human drugs used in the developing world are not what they are labelled. However, buyers do not have the means to easily evaluate them. They will develop a small paper card that reveals a color pattern upon contact with a specific drug, such as an antibiotic, representing that drug's chemical composition.

Andrew Ellington of The University of Texas at Austin in the U.S. will develop a low-cost and easy-to-use diagnostic test incorporating widely available pregnancy test strips to detect disease-causing mosquitoes. An industry partner will develop a handheld sample preparation device to extract pathogen-associated nucleic acids from live or crushed mosquitoes for diagnosis.

Jorge Rubio-Retama of Complutense University of Madrid in Spain will develop a portable photoluminescent device that can identify mosquitoes infected with human pathogens such as Dengue virus by detecting specific micro (mi)RNA molecules. They will build the sensor from light-emitting nanoparticles carrying RNA sequences that can bind to known miRNAs found in infected mosquitoes, and graphene oxide, which can also bind the nanoparticles and quench the fluorescence.

Pavan Dadlani of Philips Research in The Netherlands will create a single device that can support a better diagnosis of pneumonia in children under five years old in low-resource settings. They will complement their Children's Automated Respiratory Monitor to enable the measurement of oxygen saturation (pulse oximetry) with a single probe to accommodate all ages between 0 and 5 years old, which will lower costs. The device will also be able to transmit data via Bluetooth for recording and expert analysis, and will be designed for robustness.

Friso Schlottau of Covidien in the U.S. will develop a durable device that can measure heart and respiration rates and blood oxygen levels in people of all ages, including newborns, in low-resource settings. They will build a prototype device that can be charged like a mobile phone, incorporating adapted algorithms and a robust multi-patient sensor that can withstand extended periods of use. The device will be bench tested by simulating the range of sick and healthy patients to ensure it is functional under different conditions.

Jonathan Rubin of the University of Michigan in the U.S. will develop a simple, low-cost ultrasound device with cell phone display that can diagnose children with co-existing pneumonia and malnutrition. Over two million children per year die from pneumonia, and many of these deaths are caused by coexisting malnutrition. They will design an ultrasound stethoscope device to automatically measure lung expansion and contraction during breathing to detect ventilation problems caused by pneumonia as well as the levels of subcutaneous fat on the chest wall to detect malnutrition.

Joanne Macdonald from the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia will develop a simple diagnostic test that can be used in the field to rapidly identify mosquitoes infected with pathogens such as the malaria parasite and dengue virus. Traditional methods require costly equipment and a laboratory setting. The test combines recombinase polymerase amplification (RPA) with a lateral flow strip and can detect DNA from multiple pathogens in parallel, which will reduce costs.

Heba Khamis of the University of New South Wales in Australia will use smartphone technology to more accurately measure malnutrition in children from developing countries, which puts them at increased risk of death from diseases such as pneumonia. They will develop an image-processing algorithm for calculating three key growth parameters (height, and arm and head circumference) and thereby assessing nutritional status from a photograph of a child taken by a smartphone.