Product/Service Development

Augustino Hellar of Prime Health Initiative Tanzania will develop a machine learning algorithm for the early detection of high-risk pregnancies and integrate it into an existing mobile health application to help reduce maternal mortality in Tanzania. The existing application is being used by health care workers across 23,000 households in Tanzania’s Geita Region to track health during pregnancy and provide health education via SMS.

Ifeoluwa Olokode of Helium Health in Nigeria will develop a digital antenatal risk stratification tool to determine the risk of maternal mortality for pregnant women in Nigeria and link them to appropriate care services to reduce maternal death rates. Nigeria has one of the highest burdens of maternal mortality, with the biggest driver being a delay in the decision to seek health care.

Wyckliff Omondi from the Ministry of Health in Kenya will integrate a neglected tropical disease (NTD) surveillance program into the national blood donation program as a more cost-effective mechanism to monitor lymphatic filariasis and other endemic NTDs in Kenya. Kenya is on course to eliminate lymphatic filariasis using mass drug administration programs. Certifying regions as disease-free requires careful post-treatment assessments.

Innocent Semali of Hubert Kairuki Memorial University in Tanzania will design a more effective strategy for eliminating trachoma in the nomadic Maasai communities in Tanzania. Trachoma is a bacterial disease and a leading cause of blindness. Globally, there are around 84 million sufferers, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. In Tanzania, the standard control strategy, which involves mass drug administration of azithromycin, eliminated trachoma from most districts. However, the strategy has largely failed in nomadic populations for unclear reasons.

Vincent Cubaka of Partners In Health in the U.S. will build robust data governance structures to enable the utilization of electronic medical records from multiple countries for research purposes to improve health. So-called FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data principles enhance the value of personal medical records for research, and CARE principles were developed to protect the owners of these data. However, the rigidity of these principles can create conflicts, which can make it difficult, for example, to open access to datasets across different countries.

Damazo Kadengye of the African Population and Health Research Center in Kenya will establish a functional Learning Health System to promote the exploration of population health data from multiple sources to improve public health responses to infectious diseases in sub-Saharan Africa. Utilizing the data revolution to generate new knowledge is crucial for achieving global health targets, but there is a lack of suitable tools and limited access to data from different sources.

Luc Samison of Centre d'Infectiologie Charles Mérieux - University of Antananarivo in Madagascar will support more responsive and resilient antimicrobial resistance (AMR) surveillance systems in Madagascar and Burkina Faso by building a data science center for the electronic collection, analysis and dissemination of data. They will develop and refine data collection tools and sharing processes to promote multi-disciplinary collaborations and strengthen data governance and standards.

Rachel Chikwamba of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in South Africa together with Kerry Love of Sunflower Therapeutics in the U.S. will establish local manufacturing capacity in South Africa to increase access to protein-based biologic drugs including antibodies and vaccines, which are used for treating many different diseases. Access to biologics is unevenly distributed across the globe, and the conventional manufacturing practices are expensive and require substantial physical space and operational know-how.

Peter van Heusden of the University of the Western Cape in South Africa together with Placide Mbala of the Institut National de Récherche Biomedicale in the DRC will establish in-house pathogen sequencing capabilities at a research institute in the DRC to enable rapid responses to meningitis outbreaks and improve patient outcomes. Despite the success of vaccines, meningitis outbreaks caused by diverse bacterial species still cause substantial fatalities across Africa.

Julius Lucks of Northwestern University in the U.S. is developing a low-cost field test that can detect multiple plant pathogens and produce simple visual outputs for farmers in low-income countries to better monitor their crops. Current diagnostic field tests only detect one disease and are generally costly and difficult to use. In Phase I, they developed a sensitive, multiplexed assay that can detect multiple pathogens using biosensors and produce colorimetric outputs, and performed successful field-testing in several countries.