Vaccines & Immune Biology

TEGACWO is committed in improving nutrition and use of essential health services for women and children in prisons. Incarcerated mothers of young children are often the primary or sole caretakers of their children. Kenya law allows incarcerated women to live with their children in jail between ages 0 to 4yrs. Once the children turn 5years old they are removed from the jail facility and returned to the community to live with their relatives or people willing to adopt them.

Arun Shanbhag of Manipal University in India will use near field communication (NFC) tags to transform traditional bracelets worn by infants in India into portable vaccination records that better track particularly migrant communities to promote full childhood vaccination coverage. Vaccinations are recorded on paper, which are easy to lose and make it difficult for health workers to monitor children in migrant communities. They created beaded bracelets that can store vaccine records on a digital tag, and have developed a mobile application that can read the tag using an Android smartphone.

Daniel Carucci of The Immunity Charm Foundation in the U.S. will produce a low-cost bracelet as a visual cue to encourage parents in south Asia to get their children fully vaccinated at the appropriate times. There is a widely held belief in south Asia that black beads on a bracelet protect children from evil spirits. Using that symbol of protection they have designed an 'Immunity Charm' bracelet for infants, which has the traditional black beads as well as a series of colored beads, each representing a vaccine that protects against one disease.

Lu Lu of Shanghai Medical College, Fudan University in China working with Ling Ye of Emory University in the U.S., will design a potent HIV vaccine using selected sequences of one of the virus's envelope proteins to trigger the production of broadly neutralizing antibodies. This has been problematic due to the diversity of the viral envelope glycoprotein and its glycosylation shield, which prevent the immune system from recognizing it.

Clif Barry of The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the U.S., working with Qian Gao of Shanghai Medical College Fudan University in China, will support a clinical trial to shorten the treatment time for tuberculosis (TB) from six months to four months by helping to identify predictive biomarkers in individuals that only require the shorter treatment. Shortening treatment when possible will substantially reduce costs and the emergence of drug resistance, which is a major barrier to eradicating this deadly disease.

Babak Javid of Tsinghua University in China, working with Paul MacAry of the National University of Singapore in Singapore, will study human monoclonal antibodies that protect individuals from infection by Mycobacterium tuberculosis and could be used to develop a tuberculosis vaccine. Tuberculosis is the world's most deadly infectious disease, and the causative bacteria are present in latent form in up to a quarter of the global population.

Linqi Zhang of Tsinghua University in China, working with Tongqing Zhou of the National Institutes of Health in the U.S., will design a broadly protective vaccine against HIV-1 derived from the atomic structure of the viral envelope protein from the dominant transmitted founder HIV-1 strain isolated from a high-risk population in China. HIV is a rapidly evolving virus that continually alters its structure to elude the immune system and antiretroviral drugs. This makes it challenging to develop an effective vaccine.

Ling Ye of Emory University in the U.S., working with Lu Lu of Shanghai Medical College, Fudan University in China, will design a potent HIV vaccine using selected sequences of one of the virus's envelope proteins to trigger the production of broadly neutralizing antibodies. This has been problematic due to the diversity of the viral envelope glycoprotein and its glycosylation shield which prevent the immune system from recognizing it.

Qian Gao of Shanghai Medical College Fudan University in China, working with Clif Barry of The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the U.S., will support a clinical trial to shorten the treatment time for tuberculosis (TB) from six months to four months by helping to identify predictive biomarkers in individuals that only require the shorter treatment. Shortening treatment when possible will substantially reduce costs and the emergence of drug resistance which is a major barrier to eradicating this deadly disease.

Paul MacAry of the National University of Singapore in Singapore, working with Babak Javid of Tsinghua University in China, will study human monoclonal antibodies that protect individuals from infection by Mycobacterium tuberculosis and could be used to develop a tuberculosis vaccine. Tuberculosis is the world's most deadly infectious disease and the causative bacteria are present in latent form in up to a quarter of the global population.