Infectious Disease

Yaw Asare Afrane of the University of Ghana will build malaria modeling capacity in West Africa by training a critical mass of modeling scientists across multiple career stages to work closely with national malaria control programs (NMCPs). They will strengthen infrastructure and faculty in existing laboratories, provide technical training and support, and promote modeling as a PhD program in universities. They will also develop mathematical modeling curricula in malaria and NTDs in multiple languages and adapted for each country, which will be freely available online.

Sheetal Silal of the University of Cape Town in South Africa will establish the Malaria Modeling and Analytics: Leaders in Africa (MMALA) program to promote the training and career development of a critical mass of African malaria modelers that can support decision making of national malaria control programs (NMCPs).

Charles Wondji of the Centre for Research in Infectious Diseases in Cameroon will establish the African Consortium in Modeling for Effective Vector Control (ACoMVeC) together with seven research institutes across the continent, bringing together African scientists and northern partners in the U.S. and United Kingdom to help improve malaria control.

Wilfred Ndifon of the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences - Next Einstein Initiative Foundation in Rwanda together with Luc Djogbénou from the Université d'Abomey-Calavi, Benin, and Jeanine Condo from the University of Rwanda, will collaborate with academic institutions, operational partners and national malaria control programs (NMCPs) from Benin, Rwanda, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Mozambique, Côte d'Ivoire, Switzerland, Australia, Kenya and Ghana to create a sustainable ecosystem of mathematical modelers, translational specialists, and decision-makers to support malaria inte

Zhang Dongjing, Zheng Xiaoying, Wu Yu and Wang Gang of Sun Yat-sen University in China together with their international partners Badria El-Sayed, Tellal Ageep, Ammar Hassan and Mohamed Korti all from the National Centre for Research in Sudan, and Jeremy Bouyer, Maiga Hamidou, Hanano Yamada and Adly Abdalla of Insect Pest Control Laboratory in Austria will develop highly specific and environmentally friendly Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) to control outdoor Anopheles mosquitoes.

GuoXiong Peng, Yuxian Xia, Yueqing Cao and ZhengBo He of Chongqing University in China together with their international partner Raymond J. St. Leger of the University of Maryland in the U.S. will screen mosquitocidal fungal strains from China and abroad for high-yield virulent and stable production strains against larvae and adults, test the safety of the production strains, optimize solid fermentation medium, fermentation process and the components and proportion in the formulation to develop oil-based fungal mosquitocides for outdoor application.

Weiguo Fang of Zhejiang University and Guoding Zhu of Jiangsu Institute of Parasitic Diseases in China together with their international partner Abdoulaye Diabaté of Institut de Recherche en Sciences de La Santé in Burkina Faso, by referring to the widely used small farmer-operated factories for production of entomopathogenic fungal spores in China, will develop a spore production technology for the transgenic Metarhizium strain, which is cost-effective, of low technological bar and can be easily implemented in low-and middle-income countries and regions.

Biao Jiang, Jianhua Yao, Ping Xing, Jia Li and Wanjun Wang of the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences together with their international partners Ole Skovmand and Sérgio Sousa both of Landcent (Europe) B.V. in The Netherlands will utilize in silico screening to discover mosquito insecticide or repellent compounds in traditional Chinese medicine.

Xiao-Guang Chen, Zetian Lai and Chunmei Wang of Southern Medical University in China and their international partner Guiyun Yan of the University of California, Irvine in the U.S. will develop new traps that are more attractive to malaria vectors. They will incorporate the new traps with infrared vector detection, automatic recording and wireless transmission technologies, and test the efficacy of the new trap and the automated malaria vector surveillance apparatus both in the laboratory and in the field.

Sibao Wang of the Institute for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Duoquan Wang from the China CDC together with their international partners Abdoulaye Diabaté of Institut de Recherche en Sciences de La Santé in Burkina Faso and Marcelo Jacobs-Lorena of Johns Hopkins University in the U.S. will develop procedures to efficiently introduce a specific bacterium into field mosquitoes in order to evaluate effectiveness of the bacterium spread through mosquito populations and to block parasite transmission in a more realistic setting.