Infectious Disease

Dirk Linke of the Max Planck Society in Germany seeks to identify and classify all the molecules that make up the cell wall of gram-negative bacteria, which causes a major portion of infectious diseases. By recognizing common elements among these molecules, a broad-range vaccine could be developed to protect against a number of these diseases.

Hugo Soudeyns of Canada's Centre de Recherche du CHU Sainte-Justine will incorporate engineered frameshifting gene cassettes into vaccine vectors in hopes of eliciting broader T helper and cytotoxic T cell response, leading to better protection against disease.

Volker Gerdts of Canada's Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization proposes to use live viral vectors to immunize fetuses during pregnancy to induce immune responses in the unborn baby, thereby protecting the infant against early life infections.

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.

Francis Nano of Canada's University of Victoria will introduce essential genes found in Arctic bacteria into the genomes of "warm-loving" pathogens, making them unable to grow at core body temperatures. Such microbes could survive on human skin, which is cold enough to allow for replication and the stimulation of a strong immune system response, but not survive further dissemination into deeper and warmer tissue.

Olen Kew of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the U.S. will attempt to develop a safe and effective polio strain for use in an inactivated vaccine by modifying codon usage patterns in polio strains to control viral mutation rates, lower infectivity, and raise genetic stability.

Type III protein secretion systems are used by many bacteria to inject proteins into mammalian cells. Jorge Galan of Yale University will develop an antigen delivery machine based on the type III protein delivery system that will not require the use of live-attenuated bacteria, offering a safer vaccine platform.

Christina Smolke proposes to develop synthetic RNA devices that can process and transmit molecular input signals in hopes that this technology will result in more effective, targeted strategies for detecting and protecting against infectious disease.

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.

Samuel Landry of Tulane University will research the use of immune tolerance of dominant HIV epitopes prior to conventional vaccination with an HIV protein in order to stimulate a broader immune response.