Infectious Disease

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.

Optical information, temperature gradients, trace gases and volatile odors are key sensory inputs for mosquitoes. To mitigate the transmission of malaria, Szabolcs Marka of Columbia University in the U.S. will research how optical irradiation might be used to physically disrupt mosquitoes' sensory systems such that they can't find human hosts. This project's Phase I research demonstrated that insects are repelled or change their flight behavior in response to different infrared light gradients.

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.

Nikita Malavia of Boston's Children's Hospital has teamed up with MIT's Robert Langer to engineer nanoparticles that mimic host cells in an attempt to deceive viruses into releasing genetic material which is rendered useless by viral inhibitors.

François Baneyx of the University of Washington in the U.S. will synthesize nanoparticles consisting of an inorganic adjuvant core surrounded by a three-dimensional antigen shell. The particles will target lymph node dendritic cells that play a key role in initiating immune responses to infectious diseases.

Suzanne Fleiszig of the University of California, Berkeley will attempt to decipher the molecular mechanisms that maintain broad-spectrum antimicrobial activity of the healthy eye, which could lead to innovative strategies to combat infectious disease in general.

To generate the large numbers of infective malaria sporozites needed for use in an effective vaccine, James Kublin of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in the U.S. will use high throughput screens to develop a library of media compounds needed to optimize in vitro production.

Mark Davis of Stanford University in the U.S. will develop a new method to assess specific T cell responses to vaccinations. Using combinations of labeled tetramers to identify many types of T cell responses, Davis hopes to create better and more comprehensive assessments of immunity generated by vaccines. This project's Phase I led to the development of a new way to color-code T cells as a way to visually quantify immune response to an influenza vaccine.

By using strips of mosquito netting around houses to turn the homes into mosquito traps, Jacques Derek Charlwood of Denmarks DBL Center for Health Research and Development, in conjunction with the INS of Mozambique, hopes to develop a simple new technique to reduce malaria transmission.

With a team of researchers, economists and physician-scientists, Matthew Davis of the University of Michigan will establish a program to link new vaccine discoveries with vaccine manufacturers in developing countries while simultaneously evaluating ways to help these manufacturers purchase rights to these innovative candidates.