The objective of this Botswana-based collaboration led by David Goldfarb was to design and evaluate a user-friendly flocked-swab specimen collection system for the identification of enteric infections. This would have immediate impact in much of the world where diarrheal disease remains deadly and for the large part undiagnosed. Using an inexpensive innovation in specimen collection, the team diagnosed previously unrecognized pathogens that had caused the severe diarrhoea of over one-third of children in a group of southern African hospitals. McMaster University researchers designed and tested in Botswana a specially-designed "flocked swab" for collecting samples from children admitted to hospitals with severe diarrhoeal disease. The flocked rectal swab eliminates the wait and biohazard involved in obtaining and transporting a bulk stool (faeces) sample from an infant or child. This efficiency enabled implementation of a randomized clinical trial evaluating same-day diagnosis and treatment for a broad number of pathogens – the first study of its kind anywhere.

Hua Wang of Tsinghua University in China will use reverse vaccinology, working backwards from host broadly neutralizing antibodies, to design and discover vaccines against HIV infection.

Zhengsong Weng of Tsinghua University in China will use reverse vaccinology to seek new antigens for Streptococcus pneumonia to develop new vaccines against bacterial pneumonia.

The primary objective of this project is to develop a device to screen for substandard anti-malarials and antibiotics, thereby improving adverse maternal and neonatal health outcomes with respect to malaria and sepsis. To date, there is no device to test counterfeit and substandard drugs in the field thoroughly. To this end, we propose PharmaCheck, a user-friendly, cost-effective, contextual and high-throughput device capable of quantitatively measuring active ingredient concentration and drug release profiles to quickly and accurately screen for spurious medicines. Existing methods of counterfeit drug detection are bulky, qualitative, error-prone and do not take time-based measurements of drug release kinetics, and thus do not provide information about whether therapeutic levels of the drug are reached and sustained. PharmaCheck addresses these shortcomings through affordable fluorescence, dissolution testing, which allows for highly specific and quantitative time-course measurements of drug release. PharmaCheck will offer an affordable, effective tool for local health authorities to better safeguard the efficacy of their pharmacopeia and significantly impact maternal and neonatal health outcomes in the developing world.