Pneumonia

Yingjie Lu and Richard Malley of Children's Hospital Boston in the U.S. will develop a bivalent pneumococcal and typhoid vaccine by using a new technology to include three highly conserved pneumococcal antigens and the well-established Vi polysaccharide antigen that provides protection against typhoid fever. The team will test the ability of this vaccine to induce strong humoral and cellular immune responses against both pneumococcus and the causative agent of typhoid fever, Salmonella Typhi.

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 United Kingdom will use 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.

Pneumonia remains the world’s leading cause of death among children under five. Pneumonia is usually diagnosed based on x-ray images and lab or clinical examination, but trained personnel and resources are scarce in rural communities in Peru. Innovators have developed a highly sensitive and specific algorithm of pattern recognition that will be printed on a circuit board. This hardware box will be linked to an inexpensive and portable ultrasound echograph, and to a smartphone with dedicated software. Digital images will be transmitted from the echograph to the box and smartphone.

Pneumonia is the world’s leading cause of child mortality, causing 1.4 million deaths per year in children under five. Pneumonia is usually diagnosed based on x-ray images and laboratory/clinical examination, requiring trained medical professionals. In poor-resource settings, however, the most stricken by pneumonia, neither this technology nor the trained health care workers are present.

The Camera Oximeter will be a novel, ultra low-cost pulse oximeter that uses the built-in camera of a mobile phone to measure oxygen saturation, heart rate and respiratory rate. Software will include an advisory system for the diagnosis and treatment of respiratory diseases (pneumonia) in remote areas & community hospitals of low income countries.

Compared with industrialized countries, nations of Africa and Asia report two to 10 times the rate of child pneumonia, the killer of 2.1 million children each year. A bedside finger prick blood test developed by this project will improve pneumonia diagnosis where chest x-rays, essential for pneumonia diagnosis and management, are unavailable, saving lives and resources.

CPS conjugated vaccines, such as those used to combat pneumonia, are difficult and expensive to produce. George Wang of Ohio State University will use bacteria engineered to express CPS, the carrier protein and a key enzyme which will bind the two together in an effort to develop a simpler and more economically feasible method of vaccine production.

Hongyue Dang, of China University of Petroleum (East China) will research whether early-stage pneumonia infection produces specific biomarkers that can be detected in a breath analysis. If so, Dang will produce and test a prototype breath sensor device that can be used in low-resource settings to capture and analyze these signature chemical compounds as a method to diagnose pneumonia.

Udantha Abeyratne of the University of Queensland in Australia proposes using low-cost devices such as mobile phones and mp3 players equipped with microphones to record cough and sleeping sounds that do not require direct contact with the patient. Recording will be analyzed using new algorithms in human speech analysis to identify sounds that characterize the presence of pneumonia.

Suzanne Smith of STAR Analytical Services in the United States will study recorded cough samples with acoustic vocalization-analysis technology to identify sound characteristics that indicate specific symptoms of pneumonia with the aim of rapidly identifying the cause and severity of respiratory illness. It is hoped that such acoustic landmarks would help in the differentiation between viral infections and bacterial illnesses, each of which may require different treatments.