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.

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.

Ian Matthews of Cardiff University in the United Kingdom proposes to develop a self-sampling micro-needle patch device for the collection of small volumes of blood. Micro-needles will be fabricated using Deep Reactive Ion Etching. The device will permit non-refrigerated transport of collected blood for subsequent assays for diagnosis of infectious disease.

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.

Alice Telesnitsky of the University of Michigan in the U.S. seeks to define and characterize HIV interactions with host RNA. The team will attempt to determine whether disrupting or mimicking essential interactions with host RNAs may lead to antiviral strategies to which HIV cannot readily develop resistance.

Ahsan Khandoker of Khalifa University in the United Arab Emirates will build a low-cost, non-invasive abdominal phonogram device that can be used on a mobile phone to assess sounds that indicate fetal well being such as heart rate and body movement. The device will employ a software algorithm to extract fetal noises in an acoustic signal from maternal and environmental noises, allowing health care workers in remote locations to conduct obstetric assessments without expensive or invasive equipment.

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.

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.

Vijay Pancholi of The Ohio State University Research Foundation in the U.S. will attempt to attenuate the S. pneumonia bacteria by altering export of the GAPDH enzyme, a function thought to be essential to the bacteria's survival. Preventing export of this key enzyme will decrease bacterial virulence, allowing the attenuated strain to be used for development an affordable live vaccine for pneumococcal pneumonia.

Michael Lebens of the University of Gothenburg Institute for Vaccine Research in Sweden proposes to develop a new oral cholera vaccine using a single cholera strain that expresses antigens for both the Inaba and Ogawa serotypes and produces cholera toxin subunits that act as an adjuvant to stimulate mucosal immune activity. In this project’s Phase I research, Lebens and his team successfully generated potential vaccine candidate strains that express both Ogawa and Inaba type antigens simultaneously. They also demonstrated in an animal model that oral immunization with these bacteria in a killed formulation elicited immune responses similar to those obtained by vaccination with currently licensed oral killed whole-cell cholera vaccines. In Phase II, he will further improve these strains by inducing them to express an accompanying adjuvant and conduct immunogenicity analyses and other work to prepare for a Phase I trial.