Health Intervention

Harvey Rubin from the University of Pennsylvania in the U.S. will develop a new quantitative imaging technology that uses acoustics to measure the total body levels of the tuberculosis-causing bacterium, Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Current imaging methods are generally expensive or unable to measure in all parts of the body. This technology involves shining near-infrared light, which is safe and can penetrate deep into the body, to thermally expand a molecule activated in the presence of M. tuberculosis.

David Low from the University of California, Santa Barbara in the U.S. will engineer phage to selectively target and destroy several pathogenic bacteria to prevent enteric diseases in infants. Lytic phage infect bacteria and hold great promise as therapeutics for infectious diseases, but controlling their activity and preventing the development of bacterial resistance is challenging.

Martha Clokie from the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom will develop a bacteriophage to destroy the diarrhea-causing bacterium Shigella, and study its effect on microbial populations in the gut. Shigella is a leading cause of death in children under five years old in the developing world but there are no effective vaccines due in part to the many different forms of the bacterium. Phage are viruses that can destroy specific bacteria, and are an alternative approach to vaccines.

Sai Reddy of ETH Zürich in Switzerland will study how low levels of the immune system-stimulating molecule C3d attached to a protein from a pathogen (antigen) can lead to the production of large numbers of pathogen-fighting antibodies and thereby boost the efficacy of vaccines. They hypothesize that it involves stimulating the process of somatic hypermutation in antibody-producing B cells, which results in high titers of antibodies that can bind very strongly to the target pathogen.