Awards

Andreas Matouschek and Keith Tyo of Northwestern University in the U.S. will develop synthetic compounds that target essential proteins in the Plasmodium parasite for destruction by its own protein degradation mechanisms. This strategy could aid new small molecule drug development efforts to combat malaria.

Jay Keasling of Zagaya in the U.S. will explore the production by an endophytic fungus of artemisinin, a key ingredient in malaria treatments. If the fungus produces artemisinin in the absence of light, an enzymatic mechanism is likely involved. This mechanism could be harnessed for a new production method to reduce treatment costs for malaria patients in developing countries.

Ichiro Matsumura of Emory University in the U.S. proposes to use synthetic DNA techniques to transform Wolbachia, a bacterial parasite that infects most insect species, in an effort to engineer mosquitoes to be immune to malaria parasites.

Erdogan Gulari of the University of Michigan in the U.S proposes to design and produce a large library of antimicrobial peptides (AMPS) that will be tested against Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains to identify potential new drugs that can damage the bacterial membrane and be less susceptible to evasion by the development of resistance.

Andriy Kovalenko, Nikolay Blinov and David Wishart of the University of Alberta in Canada propose to use synthetic biology to develop protein-based metabolite biosensors. These biosensors will be used to create a simple, low-cost diagnostic test for pneumonia that is based on specific metabolite signatures found in urine.

David Segal of the University of California, Davis in the U.S. will develop a high-throughput screen to search for artificial transcription factors (ATF) that are candidates to treat P. falciparum infections. ATFs could be a gene-regulating drug resource for the study and treatment of malaria.

Francesco Ricci of the University of Rome, Tor Vergata in Italy and collaborator Alexis Vallee-Belisle of the University of California, Santa Barbara propose to develop molecular nanoswitches that provide a visual cue when they bind to HIV antibodies for use in a rapid (one minute) diagnostic test to detect and quantify HIV antibodies in serum samples.

Keith Tyo and Josh Leonard of Northwestern University in the U.S. will work to engineer yeast-based biosensors that identify protein biomarkers in samples like blood and urine. An array of yeast strains could serve as a low-cost, in-home device providing patients with a panel of diagnostics to improve treatment and diagnosis in resource-poor settings.

Alexander Douglas of the Jenner Institute, University of Oxford in the United Kingdom will use synthetic nucleic acid molecules known as aptamers to develop a model that can be used to predict the success or failure of new vaccines in clinical trials. This work could help to remove some of the uncertainty in the early-stage development of new vaccines.

Robert Abramovitch of Michigan State University in the U.S. will use their high-throughput drug discovery platform to identify new drugs for treating chronic tuberculosis and for potentially shortening the current treatment time of six to nine months. Their platform exploits a genetic region known as the DosR regulon thought to underlie the behavior of the causative bacteria in humans under low oxygen conditions, when they become dormant and thereby resistant to current drugs. In Phase I, they screened over 250,000 compounds and identified around 170 candidates that could either stop bacterial persistence under low oxygen conditions or could potently inhibit bacterial growth. In Phase II they will optimize one of the candidate DosR regulon inhibitors and test the ability of this class to block chronic infection, as well as characterizing the compounds that inhibit bacterial growth.