Product/Service Development

Heverton Dutra of Centro de Pesquisas René Rachou, FIOCRUZ in Brazil will develop an artificial diet based on protein and fat to sustain mosquitoes infected with the Wolbachia bacteria, which are needed in large numbers to prevent transmission of the dengue virus. These mosquitoes are currently being bred using vertebrate blood, which is difficult to obtain and store, and subject to stringent regulations.

Chase Beisel of North Carolina State University in the U.S. will exploit non-lytic bacteriophage for promoting infant gut health and treating enteric infections in low-resource settings. Generally, lytic phage are being studied for treating diseases, but they suffer from a number of limitations including causing resistance and the release of endotoxins, which can damage healthy cells.

Samuel Alcaine of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the U.S. will engineer bacteriophage (viruses that infect bacteria) to produce an antimicrobial compound that helps avoid bacteria such as enteroaggregative Escherichia coli developing resistance to the phage, thereby increasing their value for treating associated childhood diseases. Phage could be valuable for treating intestinal diseases that cause severe morbidity and mortality in developing countries as they can selectively destroy pathogenic bacteria.

Dawn Wesson and Sam Jameson of Tulane University in the U.S. will develop an artificial meal for mosquitoes based on algae as a protein source that can be freeze dried and stored in blister packs, and refine their reusable feeding system. Mosquitoes are currently laboratory reared using expensive and difficult to obtain mammalian blood to ensure adequate numbers of offspring for studying.

Baojun Wang of the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom will engineer bacteriophages to selectively target gut pathogens such as Shigella and Salmonella that cause widespread environmental enteropathy in infants in developing countries. They will program the CRISPR-Cas9 (clustered, regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats-CRISPR-associated proteins) nucleases to cut the chromosomes of the target pathogens, and test their ability to block infection in a mouse gut colonization model while leaving the non-pathogenic and often beneficial bacteria largely intact.

Gong Cheng of Tsinghua University in China will develop a glycan formula as a diet additive that specifically inhibits the lectin-based viral receptors in mosquitos, thereby providing a practical approach against dissemination of multiple mosquito-borne viruses.

Reza Nokhbeh from the Advanced Medical Research Institute of Canada in Canada will genetically engineer phage that infect pathogenic Escherichia coli bacteria to express proteins and short RNA molecules that block multiple bacterial functions and thereby stop it from colonizing the human gut and causing disease. Diarrheal diseases cause substantial mortality in children under five in developing countries, and there is an urgent need for new treatments. They will develop their approach to first target E.

Ry Young III from Texas A&M AgriLife Research in the U.S. will engineer particles that resemble bacteria-infecting viruses (phage), but are functionally defective, for developing treatments that can more safely modify bacteria in the infant gut and thereby protect against disease and malnutrition. So-called lytic phage physically destroy the bacteria they infect and are considered to be potentially highly valuable for treating many childhood infectious diseases that are prevalent in developing countries and cause substantial morbidity and mortality.

Todd Parsley of SynPhaGen, LLC in the U.S. will engineer phage-like particles to transfer genes into specific bacteria in the infant gut that program them to produce therapeutic proteins that protect against environmental enteric dysfunction, which is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in developing countries. Rather than employing bacteria-infecting phage to destroy bacteria, they will engineer safer particles, which are unable to replicate and do not kill the bacterial host.

Srivatsan Raman of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the U.S. will develop a platform for engineering synthetic phage - bacteria-infecting viruses - that can be easily reprogrammed to target specific bacterial species and that can be switched off to improve their safety for treating enteropathogenic diseases in newborns.