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| | |  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. | | | Find Out More... |
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| | |  Louis Schofield of The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Australia will develop a synthetic saccharide-conjugated vaccine that would provide immunity against GPI, a toxin produced by the malaria parasite that is a major determinant in the severity and fatality of the disease. | | | Find Out More... |
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| | |  Marcelo Jacobs-Lorena, of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in the U.S. proposes to modify bacteria that naturally inhabit the mosquito midgut to secrete proteins that interfere with the development of the malaria parasite in the mosquito that is necessary for malaria transmission. | | | Find Out More... |
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| | | | HIV destroys helper T cells, which are essential to activation of B-cells. Irvin Chen of UCLA in the U.S. will utilize inducible pluripotent stem cell technology to generate a constant, self-renewing source of antigen-specific B-cells, which target conserved HIV epitopes to eliminate HIV-infected cells. | | | Find Out More... |
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| | |  Uri Selome McKakpo of the University of Ghana will develop and test a rapid dipstick test that utilizes monoclonal antibodies to detect parasite antigens present in urine of infected individuals. Using this technology, the team hopes to create a new diagnostic test for malaria that requires minimal training to use and does not depend on invasive blood samples. | | | Find Out More... |
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| | | | Loren Walensky of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in the U.S. will apply a new chemical technology to engineer structurally stable HIV-1 antigens for vaccine development. Walensky will test whether preserving the critical biologically active shape of HIV-1 polypeptides will yield neutralizing antibodies upon vaccination with his laboratory’s synthetic immunogens. | | | Find Out More... |
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| | | | Because malnutrition, micronutrient deficiency and parasitic worm infection are all major risk factors for developing visceral leishmaniasis, Dinesh Mondal of International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B) will study if VL development can be prevented in asymptomatic patients through nutritional supplements of vitamin A, zinc and iron, as well as anti-helminth treatment. | | | Find Out More... |
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| | |  For viral replication, HIV viruses are dependent upon proteins, called proteases, to appropriately cleave peptides and form functional viral particles. Craig Crews of Yale University in the U.S. will attempt to exploit these proteases by designing a drug will cleave only to HIV protease and release a cytotoxin that results in programmed cell death. | | | Find Out More... |
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| | | | Chen Yangchao of the Chinese University of Hong Kong proposes developing a lentiviral vector that targets the entry and replication of influenza viruses in domestic chickens. The team plans to test the ability of these modified chickens to be resistant to various influenza viruses in an effort to reduce the frequency of flu epidemics in poultry and, ultimately, in humans. | | | Find Out More... |
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| | | | Heimo Riedel of the West Virginia University School of Medicine in the U.S. will apply zinc finger nucleases as molecular scissors to directly disrupt the genome of human papilloma virus (HPV), the causal agent of cervical cancer. Once validated, this approach could also be applied to fight other infectious diseases including malaria, pneumonia, and tuberculosis. | | | Find Out More... |
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| | | | Because DDT is the only insecticide that remains effective for more than a year, Walter Focke of the University of Pretoria in South Africa will investigate how insecticides degrade when applied on an indoor surface. Focke will then study whether combining the insecticide with paint to create a “whitewash” can mitigate this disintegration and enhance stability. | | | Find Out More... |
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| | | Marcus Horwitz and colleagues at UCLA in the U.S. will develop and test a novel drug delivery system in which nanoparticles loaded with anti-TB drugs selectively target macrophages, and release the drugs intracellularly via a pH-dependent gate, allowing delivery of high concentrations on antibiotics into the
host cells for Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
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| | | | Because human carriage of pneumococcus usually results in improved immunity to future infections without any development of disease, Stephen Gordon of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in the UK will utilize an intranasal inoculation with a safe strain of the bacteria to study the mechanisms of mucosal immunity in the lungs and to explore the potential for a vaccine based on his findings. | | | Find Out More... |
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| | | | David Sokal of Family Health International in the U.S., with colleagues at Cambridge and Drexel Universities, will develop and test low-cost filters coated with safe microbicides that can be inserted into tips of nipple shields to prevent HIV transmission during breastfeeding. | | | Find Out More... |
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| | | | Gustavo Fioravanti Vieira of Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil will create 3-D computer models of viral epitopes anchored to different alleles of MHC molecules to search for “generalist” epitopes that can be used to develop viral vaccines that are effective against a broad spectrum of pathogens. | | | Find Out More... |
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| | | | Because tuberculosis manipulates host cells to resist the immune response and current drug therapies, Nigel Savage of Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands will utilize RNAi analysis to identify the essential pathways used by the bacteria to modify its host cell. By discovering these pathways, novel therapies can be developed to counteract this host manipulation without directly targeting the pathogen and causing the development of resistance. | | | Find Out More... |
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| | | | Reto Brun (Swiss Tropical Institute) and Isabel Roditi (University of Bern) seek to identify the molecules that cue African trypanosomes, which are parasites that causes fatal sleeping sickness, to differentiate into the lifestages necessary for transmission of the parasite. Knowing how to force this transformation prematurely within the mammalian host will allow new ways to kill trypanosomes. | | | Find Out More... |
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| | | | Because Leishmania is transmitted to humans when sand flies feed on humans, Shaden Kamhawi of the National Institutes of Health in the U.S. proposes to develop a novel vaccine against salivary proteins of sand flies with the aim to induce a strong immune response against the parasite. | | | Find Out More... |
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| | | | Jefferson Vaughan of the University of North Dakota will seek to augment zooprophylaxis, the practice of using livestock to divert mosquito blood feeding away from humans, by developing an anti-mosquito vaccine for cattle that kill the insect before they bite humans. | | | Find Out More... |
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| | | | Erich Cerny of Wissenschaftlicher Fonds Onkologie in Switzerland will test whether inducing antibodies against anti-malarial drugs can significantly prolong the half-life of that drug. Antibodies elicited via immunization may form a reservoir of the active drug for long-lasting treatment for malaria. Such a “small molecule vaccine” has significant implications for efficacy and cost of malaria prevention. | | | Find Out More... |
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| | | | One hypothesis of why protective immunity to HIV in the general population is very low is that the virus can exist in a hidden form in the body and can mutate very quickly to escape immune destruction. George Dickson of Royal Holloway University of London will design and evaluate so-called "infinite-epitope" vaccines for their potential to provide simultaneous and broad protective immunity to the many variant forms of HIV. | | | Find Out More... |
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| | | | A high HIV mutation rate enables escape from powerful immune responses and anti-retroviral drugs. Reuben Harris of the University of Minnesota in the U.S. will test the hypothesis that HIV requires the human APOBEC3G protein to maintain a high mutation rate necessary for HIV survival. Inhibiting this protein may slow the mutation rate and make the virus more susceptible to immune responses. | | | Find Out More... |
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| | | | Kasturi Haldar of the University of Notre Dame in the U.S. will rapidly screen malaria parasite genes that are essential for invasion and growth in human red blood cells. Characterizing these proteins may reveal novel vaccine targets for blood stage infection. | | | Find Out More... |
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| | | | Proteins known as TRP channels are responsible for coordinating sensations of taste, temperature, light and pheromones. Craig Montell of Johns Hopkins University in the U.S. will use high throughput screening to identify compounds that can activate these TRP channels in insect vectors of disease for use in a new generation of insect repellants. | | | Find Out More... |
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| | | | Gyanu Lamichanne of Johns Hopkins University in the U.S. will develop a novel vaccine for TB based on existing BCG vaccines modified to express a gene that is specific to latent TB in order to generate a robust immune response to a latent infection. | | | Find Out More... |
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| | | | Kuan-Teh Jeang of the National Institutes of Health in the U.S. will investigate whether cells infected by one virus become resistant to infection from other viruses, and if this viral interference can confer protection against HIV. The team will develop an attenuated virus to test whether over-expression of viral envelope proteins within cells can confer resistance to further HIV infection. | | | Find Out More... |
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| | | | BK virus is a very common and non-pathogenic virus that persists in specific organs for long periods of time. Simon Lacey of Beckman Research Institute of the City of Hope in the U.S. proposes using an engineered BK virus as a vaccine vector to introduce HIV polyepitope sequences in hopes of inducing a strong and long-lasting immune response against HIV. | | | Find Out More... |
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| | | | Gadi Borkow of Cupron, Inc. in the U.S. will study the efficacy of using newly developed copper-oxide based filters that deactivate a wide range of viruses, including HIV-1, as a shield to enable HIV-infected mothers to breastfeed their infants without risking transmission of the virus. | | | Find Out More... |
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| | | | Jeff Schorey of the University of Notre Dame in the U.S. will evaluate the use of exosomes, which are small membrane vesicles released from macrophages infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis, as a new platform for TB vaccines. Exosomes contain proteins and glycolipids that can elicit a robust innate and acquired immune response. | | | Find Out More... |
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| | | | 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. | | | Find Out More... |
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| | | | Little is known about the role taste plays in the mosquito feeding process. Paul Breslin of the Monell Chemical Sense Center in the U.S. will test the sensitivity of the mosquito taste system to human skin compounds in an effort to identify key compounds that cue the insects to accept or reject blood meals from humans. | | | Find Out More... |
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| | | | When malaria parasites infect different human cells, including liver and red blood cells, it is thought that microRNAs are important developmental cues that facilitate specific events in the parasite life cycle. Jen-Tsan Chi of Duke Medical Center in the U.S. will test whether expressing liver-specific microRNAs within red blood cells will trick the parasite into undergoing liver-stage development, leading to its death. | | | Find Out More... |
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