Health Diagnostics

Tisungane Mvalo and Gerald Tegha of Lilongwe Medical Relief Fund Trust along with Msandeni Chiume at Kamuzu Central Hospital both in Malawi, Emily Ciccone from the University of North Carolina in the US and Pascal Lavoie of the University of British Columbia in Canada will establish metagenomic next generation sequencing at a research laboratory in Malawi to identify pathogens causing infections in young infants to ensure rapid treatment with appropriate therapy and limit unnecessary antibiotic use.

Muhammad Imran Nisar, Furqan Kabir, Fyezah Jehan, and Syed Asad Ali of Aga Khan University in Pakistan will employ a metagenomic sequencing approach to better identify bacterial and viral infections, including those caused by novel pathogens, in newborns and infants in Pakistan. Pakistan has the highest neonatal mortality rate in the world. Almost one third of neonatal deaths are thought to be caused by an infectious disease, but accurate diagnosis is challenging in low-resource settings.

Shabir Madhi, Vicky Lynne Baillie, and Courtney Paige Olwagen of Wits Health Consortium (Pty) Limited in South Africa will use next generation sequencing to identify pathogenic causes of neonatal deaths and stillbirths to help develop new treatments such as vaccines and better prevent disease spread. There are around 2.5 million neonatal deaths annually, and an estimated 2.6 million stillbirths, the vast majority of which occur in low- to middle-income countries.

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.

Nguyen Thanh Hung and colleagues in Children’s Hospital 1 in Vietnam will implement next generation sequencing to identify the diverse viral causes of encephalitis in children in Vietnam and develop more accurate and rapid diagnostics to improve clinical outcomes. Encephalitis is an inflammation of the brain commonly caused by viral infection and is a major contributor to childhood morbidity and mortality worldwide. Treatment requires rapid diagnosis so that the appropriate antimicrobial therapy can be administered.

Jessica Manning of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Daniel Parker of the University of California, Irvine in the U.S. are leveraging metagenomic next-generation sequencing technology to control vector-borne and enteric diseases in Cambodia. In Phase I, which coincided with the country's worst ever recorded dengue epidemic, they documented the full range of pathogens carried by wild mosquitoes and in serum samples from around 400 febrile patients in a peri-urban hospital in Kampong Speu Province.

Thushan de Silva, Abdul Karim Sesay, Helen Brotherton, and Beate Kampmann of the Medical Research Council in the United Kingdom will locally implement equipment and methods for next generation sequencing of a range of clinical sample types to detect infectious pathogens in hospitalized neonates in low-resource settings. Almost three million children under five years old die each year in sub-Saharan Africa, which is the highest rate globally. A substantial proportion is likely to be caused by pathogenic infections, including multi-drug resistant organisms.

Mohlopheni Marakalala of the Africa Health Research Institute in South Africa will study the role of specific proteins associated with immune cell death in tuberculosis patients to better understand how the disease progresses and help develop new diagnostics and therapies. Tuberculosis (TB) is a bacterial disease that causes 1.5 million deaths per year, mostly in poor countries. Understanding how the human immune system responds to TB infection could help develop more effective, host-targeted treatments.

Yingda Xie of Rutgers, The State University of NJ and JoAnne Flynn of the University of Pittsburgh, both in the U.S., will develop a non-invasive approach for testing candidate anti-tuberculosis compounds in animal models and patients using positron emission tomography-x-ray computed tomography (PET/CT). Tuberculosis (TB) is a leading cause of death in developing countries, and rates are sustained by the causative bacterium, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, developing resistance to current drugs.

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.