Therapeutics/Drugs

Highly infectious "superspreaders" often drive the spread of infectious agents but are difficult to identify and treat. Leor S. Weinberger of UCSD and James Lloyd- Smith of UCLA will develop and test engineered pseudoviruses called Therapeutic Infectious Particles (TIPs), which conditionally replicate along with the pathogen as it spreads through populations, but have their virulence elements replaced with therapeutic elements that slow down disease progression and curtail transmission.

The neurotransmitter octopamine is unique to the invertebrate nervous system and plays a crucial role in invertebrate behavior and fertility. Mark Alkema of the University of Massachusetts in the U.S. will attempt to design drugs to disrupt the biosynthesis of octopamine as a new strategy to interfere with the lifecycle of invertebrate parasites.

In an effort to develop a low cost and easily transportable therapeutic, Eric Lam of Rutgers, State University of New Jersey in the U.S. will develop transgenic tomatoes that express RNAs that targets several relevant viruses. The team will test whether these antiviral RNAs can accumulate in mammals after their ingestion to suppress viral proliferation.

Ms. Sanah Jowhari at TheraCarb, a biotechnology company in Canada, will apply polymer-based drug technology to capture and remove the Cholera toxin from the body of a host, and validate an approach to developing a viable drug candidate for Cholera.

Xilin Zhao of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey will test whether anaerobic gas, which causes rapid depletion of oxygen, will kill the tuberculosis bacteria without permanent damage to surrounding tissue.

Brian Foy and Massamba Sylla of Colorado State University will research whether providing endectocides, drugs that kill parasitic worms, to animals and humans will effectively kill mosquitoes which feed on them. Through targeted and spaced drug administration, mosquitoes incubating disease-causing pathogens are expected to die prematurely, thus interrupting disease transmission, but these methods would limit the development of endectocide resistance.

Joseph DeRisi of the University of California at San Francisco proposes to engineer naturally occurring erythrotropic bacteria to target malaria infected red blood cells to serve as a potential prophylactic and treatment for malaria in humans.

Philip Bryan of the University of Maryland will use an engineered protease to destroy a specific Plasmodium surface protein that is essential in host cell invasion.

Matthew Fuchter and collaborators at Imperial College London in the United Kingdom proposes to test whether a novel chemical produced in some fungus species can control enzymes that control immune escape mechanisms in malaria parasites. If successful, this approach may not only force the parasite to present many surface proteins that are normally absent and stimulate a powerful immune response, but could also directly kill malaria parasites.

Ronald Quinn of Griffith University's Eskitis Institute in Australia and colleagues are seeking to discover chemical fragments drawn from a variety of natural sources that bind to proteins expressed by the malaria parasite in its latent stage and the tuberculosis microorganism. In their Phase I and Phase II research, the team is working on identifying compounds that target proteins involved in key metabolic and energy pathways of latency as the basis for new drug therapies.