Product/Service Development

Carlton Evans of Asociacion Benefica PRISMA in Peru will use conditional cash incentives to encourage individuals in poor communities that have been newly diagnosed with tuberculosis to help identify neighboring tuberculosis sufferers and encourage them and their families to receive treatment. Effective treatments exist for most forms of tuberculosis, but reaching the poor and most vulnerable individuals has proven challenging.

Abdur Razzaque Sarker from the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease in Bangladesh will test whether group prenatal care for women has a positive effect on maternal and child health when compared with traditional one-on-one prenatal care. They hypothesize that prenatal classes with groups of 8-10 women will promote support networks and social interactions, and facilitate learning, thereby improving health outcomes. This will be tested using a prospective study in selected health centers in Bangladesh.

Edwin Routledge of Brunel University in the United Kingdom will work towards developing an artificial snail decoy to attract the parasite Schistosoma mansoni, which causes chronic disease. The parasites first develop inside aquatic snails, which they locate via chemical cues (chemoattractants), before they can infect humans. Routledge will identify the relevant chemoattractants by isolating and fractionating chemicals from the snails, and test the ability of these chemicals to attract the parasites.

Louise Kelly-Hope of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in the United Kingdom and Thomas Unnasch of the University of South Florida in the U.S., along with their research teams, will develop high resolution tools to map the locations and chart the habitats of vectors of several parasitic worm infections to promote safer and more effective control strategies. Some of the drugs that can successfully treat parasite infections become harmful in the presence of other parasites, but predicting where these co-infections are most likely to occur is difficult.

Yanping Chen of the University of California, Riverside in the U.S. will develop an inexpensive and robust sensor to directly measure the real-time density of insect vectors that transmit parasitic diseases to help plan intervention and treatment programs. Preliminary results indicate that insects can be classified based on the frequency of their wingbeats, which also varies depending on the time of day. Chen will develop an accurate detection system by investigating combining wingbeat frequency with circadian rhythms and other behaviors.

Tony Goldberg of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the U.S. will promote the use of flip-flop-style sandals to disrupt the transmission of soil-borne helminths in rural Uganda. Soil-transmitted helminth infections are one of the most common infections worldwide. Their transmission can be disrupted by wearing sandals, but convincing people to wear them has proven challenging.

James Tibenderana and colleagues of the Malaria Consortium in the United Kingdom are adapting a "community dialogue" approach to build trust between communities and the health system in Mozambique in order to boost participation in Mass Drug Administration (MDA) programs against neglected tropical diseases. Low participation in MDA programs is thought to be caused by negative local perceptions of these diseases and a limited understanding of the goals of MDAs.

Eric Loker of the University of New Mexico in the U.S., along with colleagues from KEMRI in Kenya, will test whether parasitic flatworms known as amphistome flukes can eradicate the human parasite Schistosoma with the goal of helping prevent human infections. These two types of worms co-inhabit the same snail species. The investigators will harvest large quantities of amphistome eggs from the rumens of routinely slaughtered goats and cattle, and use temperature and light to induce miracidia (larva) to hatch in the laboratory.

Jinlin Zhou of the Shanghai Veterinary Research Institute in China will develop anti-tick biological agents composed of double-stranded (ds) RNAs targeting two selected tick proteins to control the dominant tick species Rhiphicephalus haemaphysaloides, which causes human and animal diseases in south Asian countries. Previous control approaches using pesticides or vaccines have had limited success. Long dsRNAs, which silence target genes, have previously been used successfully to control a tick infestation in cattle. Zhou has selected two candidate proteins in R.

Niaina Rakotosamimanana of the Pasteur Institute of Madagascar in Madagascar will develop a low-cost tuberculosis diagnostic and molecular test for pregnant women using dried blood samples drawn from finger pricks. This dried-blood spot based test is minimally invasive, can be used in remote areas where people lack access to all-weather roads and lack of infrastructure that has direct impact on health outcomes.