Jack McPartland of Future Buro in Australia will work to turn the figure "0.7%" – which is the United Nations target for aid donations from the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of developed countries – into a brand that can be communicated to tell the story about the proportionally small amount of financial resources needed to make an impact in the developing world. After branding is created, Future Buro will work to secure partnerships to facilitate donations of 0.7% of incomes, budgets, and media space to expand the reach of targeted communications about the positive impact of foreign aid.

Robert Kingsley of the Quadram Institute Bioscience in the United Kingdom will locate the typhoid fever-causing bacteria S. Typhi in water reservoirs in Harare, Zimbabwe, and identify any associated protozoa species present in the water that may be supporting disease spread. Typhoid fever is endemic in Zimbabwe, with several major outbreaks reported in the last decade. The bacteria persist in unclean aquatic environments, possibly supported by protozoa, and are transmitted to humans through ingestion of contaminated drinking water. They will detect S. Typhi in sewage effluent and low-quality drinking water in hotspots of typhoid transmission by enrichment culture and PCR, and use whole genome sequencing to establish the phylogenetic relationship between these bacteria and clinical typhoid isolates in the same city. They will also amplify 18S rDNA from the sewage and drinking water samples to characterize the microbial community in water and define the protozoa population. These data will help identify potential synergistic interactions between S. Typhi and other microbes to inform prevention strategies.

Denise Monack of Stanford University in the U.S. will use a genetic approach to identify the molecular mechanisms that enable the typhoid fever-causing bacterium S. Typhi to survive in aquatic environments and to rapidly adapt to transmission to humans. Annually, S. Typhi causes over 20 million infections and 200,000 deaths, mostly among populations that lack access to clean drinking water. Understanding how S. Typhi persists in water and then quickly adapts to its human host is critical for controlling transmission. Bacteria use various mechanisms to adapt to environmental changes, including so-called RNA thermometers (RNATs), which form secondary structures in mRNAs that can rapidly activate gene expression when temperatures change. They will use their established genetic screening approach to identify new RNATs in S. Typhi and validate their ability to promote bacterial persistence within aquatic microbial communities by generating mutants. They will also follow up on past work in which a bioinformatics approach identified new RNATs that may regulate the expression of the chitinase enzyme, which is used by the cholera-causing bacterium to bind to plankton and create a protective environmental niche. They will evaluate whether chitin is also important for S. Typhi persistence and transmission.

Hideaki Tsutsui of the University of California, Riverside in the U.S. will develop a low-cost stamp to directly print biosensors on maize leaves for colorimetric detection of biotic stresses. The strategy is to develop an immunochromatographic assay using microneedle probes while printing an easily-read color-change detector.

Kelly Johnston and others from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in the United Kingdom will develop a cell line from a parasitic filarial nematode worm that can proliferate continuously in vitro to enable high-throughput screening of candidate anti-filarial drugs. Current drug screening efforts are limited by the complex life cycle of the worms and the difficulties of obtaining sufficient numbers of worms. They will isolate worm cells from various life cycle stages and use a high-content screening approach to monitor thousands of cells cultured under different conditions to increase the probability of detecting a stably growing cell line. Once one or more stable cell lines have been produced, they will establish optimal culture conditions for drug screening assays.

Edwin Routledge of Brunel University in the United Kingdom will work towards developing an artificial snail decoy to attract the parasite Schistosoma mansoni, which causes chronic disease. The parasites first develop inside aquatic snails, which they locate via chemical cues (chemoattractants), before they can infect humans. Routledge will identify the relevant chemoattractants by isolating and fractionating chemicals from the snails, and test the ability of these chemicals to attract the parasites. Effective chemoattractants will be characterized and ultimately incorporated into a biodegradable matrix to generate an artificial snail that is easy to deploy in the field and can trap and destroy the parasites, thereby reducing human transmission.

Christopher Vinnard of Drexel University in the U.S. proposes to develop a low-cost point-of-care urine test that can safely and accurately identify tuberculosis patients who poorly absorb anti-TB drugs. Testing patients for inadequate drug bioavailability could enable better drug dose optimization and decrease transmission rates.

Koen Dechering of TropIQ Health Sciences in the Netherlands is developing a high-throughput functional assay to identify new compounds that specifically block transmission of the malaria parasites to their vector hosts, which is a difficult stage to target, and to test candidate drugs. The assay incorporates luciferase- expressing parasites, which emit light as they develop in the mosquito midgut, along with barcoded chemical libraries. In Phase I, they tested several barcoding strategies and identified a bacterium that could be genetically modified to carry a unique barcode for identifying hit compounds selected in the screen. They also developed the luminescent reporter parasite to track transmission. In Phase II, they will further develop the assay for higher throughput, and screen compounds from the Tres Cantos Antimalarial Set and the MMV Validation, Malaria and Pathogen boxes. They will also use the assay to characterize the mechanisms of action of other candidate transmission-blocking compounds.

Donald Cooper of Mobile Assay Inc. in the U.S. will develop a low-cost, highly sensitive smartphone-based platform that employs phone cameras to image and amplify signals from immunoassay rapid test strips to detect Botrytis and aflatoxin infection in seeds or soil. Connecting phone data to a cloud server would allow farmers to monitor seed and crop quality and enable the development of regional preventative strategies.

Sudhin Thayyil of the University College London in the United Kingdom, along with Seetha Shankaran of Wayne State University in the U.S. and Balraj Guhan of Calicut Medical College in India, will develop and validate a low-cost, low-technology whole body cooling device that operates on a proven servo-controlled algorithm with minimal supervision. This device could reduce death and disability resulting from neonatal encephalopathy in developing countries where expensive cooling equipment and trained healthcare providers are scarce.

Our proposal will provide this life-saving treatment to isolated, extremely resource poor people by obviating the need for electricity. This will be achieved by applying recently developed hydrological engineering approaches to extract the pressure differential required for the adsorption process exploited by Oxygen concentrators. This project aims to develop and test an electricity free Oxygen concentrator suitable for a developing world health facility. This represents a major paradigm shift, as to-date the problem has been interpreted as how to supply electricity to an Oxygen concentrator. In comparison with solar and generator based approaches the prototype will require significantly less capital cost and maintenance. Further, construction out of locally available components will empower the community to independently and sustainably access this life-saving treatment.

Pietro Alano of the Instituto Superiore de Sanità in Italy will develop a biochip that mimics the midgut of the Anopheles mosquito and can be used to more easily and quickly test candidate anti-malarial compounds for blocking transmission of the causative Plasmodium parasite. Malaria is a potentially fatal infection caused by parasites transmitted between humans through the bites of infected mosquitoes. When a mosquito bites an infected person, immature Plasmodium gametocytes enter the mosquito and transform into an invasive ookinete stage in its midgut. They then traverse the gut wall to the external gut lumen, where they enter their parasite stage. To eliminate malaria, compounds are needed that block the transmission of Plasmodium. However, current methods to evaluate the candidate transmission-blocking drugs or vaccines that are under development are slow and involve feeding malaria-infected blood to mosquitoes, which is potentially dangerous. As an alternative, they will create a biochip to reproduce the mosquito midgut environment that can support the development of parasites, and develop a bioluminescent antibody-based technique to count successfully traversing ookinetes. They will test the performance of the biochip using known anti-transmission drugs.

Ravi Durvasula of the Biomedical Research Institute of New Mexico in the U.S. is developing biopolymers to encapsulate and protect fungal biopesticides, which are used to kill desert locusts that destroy crops in Africa. The polymer will not only shield the biopesticides from harsh environmental conditions such as UV radiation and heat but will also be formulated to release its contents upon contact with the insect.

Aymeric Goyer of Oregon State University and Pamela Ronald of the University of California, Davis in the U.S. will develop rice plants that accumulate higher levels of thiamine (vitamin B1) to test the theory that boosting thiamine enhances the plant's resistance to disease. This strategy could lead to crops that can not only resist two devastating pathogens, Xanthomonas oryzae and Magnaporthe grisea, and lead to higher yields, but also produce rice of higher nutritional value.

Philip J. Shaw of Thailand's National Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology will seek to identify potential drug targets and vaccine antigens in the malaria parasite using a novel technology to reduce specific gene expression. By fusing a natural genetic “riboswitch” onto gene targets, the team will attempt to attenuate gene expression and thereby determine gene function.

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.

Postpartum hemorrhage (PPH) is the leading cause of maternal mortality in low-income countries. The majority of these deaths occur outside the health care system, and so an intervention that could be used in any setting and with minimal training could save lives. We will use an animal model to demonstrate appropriate uterine fill, and a proof-of-concept study to show stoppage of post-delivery bleeding and test ease of removal. Standard care for treating PPH consists of massage, uterotonics, and tamponade (i.e., "holding pressure"). Devices used to treat PPH via tamponade are not easily adaptable to low-resource settings with diverse climates and providers. A novel agent, the XSTAT mini sponge dressing, has proven successful in the acute cessation of traumatic non-compressible bleeding analogous to PPH. This device utilizes pre-packaged, environmentally stable, compressed medical sponges soaked with a hemostatic agent and administered by a light-weight applicator. The sponges, once deployed, exert uniform pressure to address multiple sources of bleeding and are easily removable.

Anders Hakansson of the University of Buffalo in the U.S. has identified a protein from human breast milk (Human Alpha Lactalbumin Made Lethal to Tumor cell, or HAMLET), that kills respiratory tract bacteria. Hakansson will attempt to understand the mechanism by which HAMLET binds to and kills pheumococci without the bacteria developing resistance.

Because Leishmania is transmitted to humans when sand flies feed on humans, Jesus Valenzuela 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.

To optimize the effectiveness of current anti-tuberculosis drugs, Boitumelo Semete of the CSIR in South Africa will work with collaborators to develop “sticky nanoparticles” that specifically attach to TB-infected cells. Once taken in by these cells, the nanoparticles will slowly degrade, releasing the anti-TB drugs and killing the bacteria. With this novel drug delivery system, the team aims to improve the bioavailability of the current therapies, with the possibility of shortening the treatment period for TB as well as reduce drug side effects.

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.

David Sullivan of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the U.S., along with Martin N. Martinov of Gradient Biomodeling LLC, will create a quantum physics computer model of liver-stage malaria parasite infection to screen existing commercial drug and compound databases to identify molecules that possess liver-stage specific anti-malarial activity. Those molecules will then be tested in vivo and in vitro, and the ones that are effective will be optimized via computer modeling for future pre-clinical development.

Douglas Weibel of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the U.S. proposes to develop a portable diagnostic system that uses inexpensive plastic assay cartridges that wick samples into chambers loaded with reagents to detect bacteria associated with neonatal sepsis. The cartridges will be attached to a smart phone loaded with an application that collects data and transmits results to a clinical lab for further treatment instructions.

Feng Qian of Tsinghua University in China will work to develop an inhaled drug particle using a scalable formulation process to deliver tuberculosis drugs directly into the lungs. They will develop micro-particles containing current TB drugs and will test their utility when inhaled.

Stéphane Blanc of the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA) in France will minimize the destructive effects of aphids on crop plants by studying a newly described structure, the acrostyle, which is found at the tip of the piercing mouthparts of the insects and thought to be important for feeding and for transmitting disease-causing viruses between plants. Aphids spread an array of different plant viruses to many crop species including banana, chickpea, and sweet potato. Work during Phase I involved developing tools including acrostyle-targeting antibodies and methods to genetically manipulate aphids, which led to the identification of one protein in the acrostyle that is likely to be a receptor for the cauliflower mosaic virus. Consistent with this, binding of this virus to the insect could be blocked with an antibody targeting that specific protein. In Phase II, they will complete their cataloguing of peptides at the acrostyle using mass spectrometry to identify more candidate receptors that are important for virus binding and transmission, and potentially also for insect feeding. These peptides will be further analyzed using newly developed genetic tools to determine their precise function. They will also use structural methods including nuclear magnetic resonance to identify key amino acid residues in the peptides that could be exploited to block both virus transmission and insect feeding, and thereby weaken the aphids.

Joseph Turner of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in the United Kingdom will develop a small animal model of the parasitic disease onchocerciasis, also called river blindness, which is the second leading infectious cause of blindness. Treatment options for filarial infections are currently limited and lack effectiveness. Thus, small animal models of filarial infections are invaluable for preclinical testing of candidate drugs. In Phase I, they established the mouse model by infecting mice lacking an adaptive immune system with Onchocerca parasites isolated from infected cows, and tested its feasibility for screening drugs. In Phase II, they will expand their model, and use it for preclinically testing the safety and efficacy of several candidate drugs currently under development.

Recent evidence suggests that HIV infection may be drastically enhanced when a specific protein found in human semen is present in fibril form. David Eisenberg of UCLA in the U.S. will design and test a small peptide that can effectively block formation of fibrils on this protein. If successful, the therapy could be administered via spray or liquid drops to inhibit transmission of HIV.

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.

Antibodies and the complement system work together to specifically detect and clear viruses, but they are circumvented by HIV, which hides itself and the cells it infects by hijacking host proteins such as CD59. Qigui Yu of Indiana University School of Medicine in U.S. will attempt to unmask HIV and HIV-infected cells and render them susceptible to antibody-complement attack. In this project's Phase I research, Yu and his team identified a potent, specific, and non-toxic inhibitor of human CD59, which is used by HIV to escape destruction by antibody-complement attack. In Phase II, Yu will continue to research how this inhibitor might allow antibodies to regain their complement-mediated activity to destroy the virus and HIV-infected cells, and will also research how HIV-1 incorporates human CD59 onto viral particles to escape antibody-complement immunity.

Thomas Neumann of Nortis, Inc. in the U.S. will develop a tissue-engineered model of the mosquito midgut for use in an in vitro assay on a disposable, chip-like microfluidic device. This device could be developed into a standardized and automated platform to screen anti-malarial compounds that target the parasite in the mosquito before transmission to human hosts.

Anton Middelberg of the University of Queensland in Australia proposes to develop a new vaccine for rotavirus by the directed self-assembly of a safe virus-like particle in industrial reactors. The approach uses low-technology engineering methods suitable for the developing world, ensuring relevance to the communities most in need of vaccine.

Wendy Picking and a team at Oklahoma State University in the U.S. will work to develop a new vaccine for Salmonella that uses a serotype-independent Salmonella antigen combined with an adjuvant to deliver immunity against all serotypes of the bacteria. This vaccine, when administered intradermally, could be a cost-effective way to reduce the overall incidence and severity of diarrhea in children in the developing world.

Tania Maria Ruffoni Ortiga from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro in Brazil will measure the levels of so-called ABC transporters throughout pregnancy, and during normal and preterm labor, and how they are influenced by infections such as malaria and influenza, to determine whether they might increase the risk of preterm labor. ABC transporters sit in the outer membranes of cells and actively transport drugs, toxins and immune signaling molecules out of them. In this way, they regulate the immune response, hormonal signaling and the activity of drugs such as antibiotics, which become particularly important during pregnancy and labor. They will collect human intrauterine tissue at different time points during pregnancy and during cesarean delivery from hospitals in Brazil and Canada, and investigate the distribution of ABC transporters and the association with infection. They will also use a mouse model of malaria to evaluate the effect on the levels and activity of the transporters.

Ashish Ganguly and colleagues from the CSIR-Institute of Microbial Technology in India will make an affordable paper-based diagnostic to quickly and precisely measure plasma gelsolin levels in expectant mothers to help predict premature delivery and postpartum recovery, thereby reducing new mother and child mortality rates. They will determine the value of plasma gelsolin levels for predicting postpartum-related problems using patient sampling and an animal model of preterm birth. They will also develop the diagnostic by identifying a plasma gelsolin binding peptide that will be used to coat an optimized paper strip, along with a cell phone based read-out to enable remote analysis by a centralized unit. This grant was selected through India's IKP Knowledge Park and their IKP-GCE program.

Maternal mortality ratios in Ghana referral hospitals remain as high as 957-1,004/100,000 live births. Poor outcomes and dismal quality of care stem from delayed identification of complications upon arrival; women wait can hours or even days for evaluation and treatment. Kybele-Ghana will implement its obstetric triage program to six referral hospitals over two years, ultimately reaching 80% of Ghana's tertiary hospitals.

Federico Costa of the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil, Mitermayer Galvão dos Reis of Fiocruz, Brazil, and Nathan Grubaugh and Albert I Ko of Yale University in the U.S. will establish metagenomic next generation sequencing in clinical settings in an urban region of Brazil classified as an infectious disease ‘hot spot’ to help develop new diagnostics and identify emerging pathogens. Rapid urbanization in Salvador, a metropolitan of 2.9 million inhabitants in Northeast Brazil, has produced a favorable environment for the emergence and spread of infectious diseases, and was the founding site for the recent Zika epidemic. Early detection is critical for preventing disease spread, particularly in Salvador, which is a transport hub and popular holiday destination. However, diagnosis can be challenging in low-resource settings, especially when the causative pathogen is unknown, the disease has diverse symptoms, or a known pathogen starts causing new symptoms. They will collect around 160 clinical samples from patients with suspected infections at a local infectious disease reference hospital and a maternity unit and apply a next generation sequencing approach together with the IDseq analysis platform to identify pathogens from the sequencing data.

Frans Walther of the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute in the U.S. will adapt a low-cost synthetic lung surfactant for aerosol delivery as a non-invasive and simple method to support breathing in premature infants. Surfactant is composed of lipids and proteins, and keeps the lungs open during expiration. It is normally administered to premature infants with breathing difficulties by tracheal intubation, which can be problematic in low-resource settings and cause side effects. In Phase I, they produced the surfactant aerosol and found that it improved oxygenation and lung function in a small animal model. In Phase II, they will continue preclinical development by analyzing different application methods, dosing levels, and safety, and evaluate dry surfactant formulations that would not require refrigeration.

Fredos Okumu of the Ifakara Health Institute in Tanzania will develop technology to evaluate mosquito control interventions using a combination of artificial intelligence, infrared spectroscopy, and entomology. Malaria caused over 400,000 deaths in 2017, the majority in the developing world, and an effective way to control the disease is to target the mosquitoes that transmit it. Current tools cannot precisely measure mosquito age or life-expectancy, and are therefore unable to predict the impact of mosquito control interventions. The biochemical composition of the mosquito exoskeleton varies with species and age; as the types of chemical bonds change so does the amount of light absorbed in the mid-infrared region. This can be measured with mid-infrared spectroscopy (MIRS), and they will combine this with machine learning to measure the age of mosquito populations. Using a dataset collected from over 25,000 lab-raised mosquitoes, they have developed a supervised machine learning model that accurately predicts mosquito age and species. They will optimize this model to work also on wild mosquito populations, develop an online platform for real-time analysis of mosquito MIRS data, and test its ability to measure the effectiveness of malaria control interventions.

H.V. Jagadish of the University of Michigan in the U.S. will take disparate datasets on diverse topics, including education, health, and the environment, which are often reported using different geographical units such as Zip Code or County, and realign them to a common unit so they can be better compared and used. Jagadish will develop four general techniques for aligning data partitions and apply them to existing datasets in one state in the U.S. so that they can be viewed according to different geographical units. Jagadish will also produce an interface so that policy analysts and NGOs can easily access and query these data, and collect feedback to improve the approach.

Eric Loker of the University of New Mexico in the U.S., along with colleagues from KEMRI in Kenya, will test whether parasitic flatworms known as amphistome flukes can eradicate the human parasite Schistosoma with the goal of helping prevent human infections. These two types of worms co-inhabit the same snail species. The investigators will harvest large quantities of amphistome eggs from the rumens of routinely slaughtered goats and cattle, and use temperature and light to induce miracidia (larva) to hatch in the laboratory. These will then be tested for their ability to infect schistosome-transmitting snails and to block or prevent schistosome infections in these snails. This low-tech, low-cost approach is more environmentally friendly than current chemical approaches, and its application to transmission sites can be easily halted once infection rates are under control.

Mosquito transmitted pathogens such as dengue and malaria are a significant disease burden on the world's population. Paul Young of the University of Queensland in Australia aims to develop a novel vaccine approach that is based on blocking mosquito transmission of these disease agents rather than inducing pathogen- specific immunity.

Arturo Casadevall of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the U.S. will work to develop a new vaccine for tuberculosis that uses an arabinomannan-protein conjugate to elicit strong antibody-mediated immunity. M. tuberculosis has a polysaccharide capsule composed of arabinomannan, which, when used as part of a vaccine, could lead to an immune response that prevents inflammation and disease transmission without impairing clearance of the bacteria.

Michael Leibowitz of the UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in the U.S. will investigate whether malaria parasites bind to, invade and replicate in the endothelial cells that line the blood vessels to test the theory that endothelial cells play an important role in the development of malaria infection and may serve as undiscovered reservoirs for parasite latency.

Paul de Figueiredo and Daniel Alge of Texas A&M University in the U.S. will develop a portable, disposable bioreactor for the low-cost production of gut microbial biotherapeutics at an estimated $0.09 per dose in low-resource settings. Dysfunction of the human gut microbiome is a common consequence of malnutrition in poor countries. It may be effectively treated with live biotherapeutics, yet current production methods are complicated and expensive. Glucose oxidase consumes oxygen as a co-substrate in glucose oxidation and has been shown to create hypoxic microenvironments in vitro, similar to that in the human gastrointestinal tract. They will engineer an inexpensive bioreactor by immobilizing glucose oxidase in a hydrogel placed in dialysis tubing and incubated in liquid media; the glucose oxidation reaction will deplete the bioreactor of oxygen and create an oxygen gradient to mimic the intestinal lumen. This will enable growth of a consortium of anaerobic bacteria, after which the microparticles will be removed by filtration. They will optimize the system using an artificial consortium of at least ten strains of common gut bacteria.

The innovation is “Virtual Mentor" that when triggered by a spoken command interacts audibly with the birth attendant during a postpartum hemorrhage (PPH) event to increase adherence to established management algorithms and timeliness of interventions. We will use an “off-the-shelf" package to rapidly and inexpensively develop the prototype for a PPH VM--the Amazon Alexa device.

Jonah Sacha of the Oregon Health & Science University in the U.S. will explore a new approach to vaccine design by using a cytomegalovirus (CMV) vector expressing conserved influenza antigens to induce an effector memory T cell response that persists in the lungs and can provide lifelong immunity against influenza. The development of a universal influenza vaccine is a top global health priority: four pandemic outbreaks in the last 100 years killed tens of millions of people, and current antibody-mediated vaccines target highly variable antigenic proteins that are extremely strain-specific and unable to protect against future threats. Work on HIV and tuberculosis vaccines has shown that CMV-vectored vaccines can elicit and maintain effector memory T cells (T_EM) at high frequency in the lung. While T_EM don’t protect against infection, they restrict pathogen replication in the lung to the point that it is effectively eliminated. They will extend this work to influenza vaccine development, determining whether a CMV vaccine can protect cynomolgus macaque monkeys from the highly pathogenic 1918 influenza strain. After establishing the minimum lethal dose of the virus, they will vaccinate monkeys with a CMV vector expressing three highly conserved influenza viral proteins. They will characterize the subsequent cellular immune response, and then challenge the vaccinated animals with a low dose of 1918 influenza to evaluate the ability of the vaccine to protect them from infection.

The project aims to discover molecular scaffolds that could be forerunners of EAEC therapeutics. Following a small molecule library screen, the team is evaluating hits, determining their mechanisms of action and their potential to be progressed as drug candidates. The group will also apply their anti-biofilm screen to other small libraries with a view to increasing the repertoire of promising leads against EAEC and other neglected enteric pathogens.

Gerald R. Smith of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in the U.S. seeks to identify inhibitors of a bacterial DNA repair enzyme that allows tuberculosis to mutate. Identifying these inhibitors could lead to therapies that kill bacteria and limit drug resistance.

Kindie Tesfaye-Fantaye of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico will develop a computational model that incorporates the variable characteristics of households and farms to better predict the outcomes of agricultural interventions in Ethiopia in order to inform policy choices. Agriculture is central to the Ethiopian economy; it accounts for almost 50% of the gross domestic product and 80% of total employment, yet the industry struggles with limited infrastructure and environmental challenges. Prioritization of agricultural policies has generally relied on analysis of past observations, which are static and tend to ignore variability. They will build and validate an agent-based model that uses current data to model future outcomes, and input biophysical (e.g., soil, climate) and socioeconomic (e.g., household characteristics, land use, access to market and financing) data. They will test their model by comparing five candidate policy options under consideration by the government in terms of impact, effectiveness, efficiency, and inclusiveness. Once established, the model will be scaled up for policy intervention in other Sub-Saharan countries including Tanzania and Nigeria.