Higher Research Funding Leads to 4x Rise in New Anti-Malaria Product Pipeline

A new analysis of progress in the global fight against malaria finds a four-fold increase in annual funding for malaria research and development (R&D) in just 16 years—increasing from US$121 million in 1993 to US$612 million in 2009, with a particularly rapid increase since 2004. The funding has generated the strongest pipeline of malaria control and prevention products in history.

The report warns, however, that even a small decline in annual funding could jeopardize this pipeline, derail development of needed products, and paradoxically also increase development costs later. The report’s authors assessed progress to date against the R&D funding goals in the 2008 Global Malaria Action Plan and what will be needed in the coming decade to deliver the suite of products needed to manage, eliminate and—ultimately—eradicate malaria from the world. The answer is sustained, relatively modest increases that will boost total annual funding to US$690 million by 2015, followed by a larger jump in 2016 to US$785 million. [Read more…]

Sanaria Announces Products for Malaria Research

Biotechnology company Sanaria has announced the launch of a suite of products intended to advance research towards new malaria vaccines, drugs, and diagnostics, and enhanced understanding of malaria pathology and immunobiology.

Sanaria’s mission is to develop and commercialize wholeparasite malaria vaccines that confer high-level, long-lasting protection against malaria caused by Plasmodium falciparum and P. vivax.

In the process of developing these vaccines, Sanaria has developed the capacity to manufacture and assay malaria parasites and mosquitoes in a highly regulated, cGMP compliant, industrial setting.

The company has announced that these parasites, mosquitoes, and assay services are now available to the general research community:

  • Sanaria Plasmodium falciparum Sporozoite Reagents: Aseptic, purified, vialed, cryopreserved, attenuated and non-attenuated Plasmodium falciparum (Pf) sporozoites.
  • Sanaria PfSPZ Challenge Mosquitoes: Live, aseptic and non-aseptic P. falciparum infected mosquitoes. These well-characterized mosquitoes are for experimentally challenging volunteers in studies assessing malaria vaccines and drugs and for laboratory-based research.
  • Sanaria Plasmodium Reagents: Purified, vialed, cryopreserved, attenuated and nonattenuated Plasmodium species sporozoites, as well as other life cycle stages for laboratory-based research studies.
  • Sanaria Plasmodium Reagent Slides: Slides for immunofluorescence assays to
    detect antibodies against purified sporozoite, and asexual erythrocytic, sexual
    erythrocytic and/or mosquito stages of Plasmodium species.
  • Sanaria Anopheles Reagents: Aseptic and non-aseptic Anopheles stephensi
    mosquitoes and derived material for laboratory-based research studies.
  • Sanaria Plasmodium Assay Services: Assessment of the effects of antibodies and
    drugs on the capacity of P. falciparum and P. vivax sporozoites to invade and develop in
    hepatocytes (inhibition of sporozoite invasion and inhibition of liver stage development
    assay), and of P. falciparum gametocytes to develop to oocysts and sporozoites in
    mosquitoes (transmission blocking assay). Assessment of antibodies to all life cycle
    stages of Plasmodium species by immunofluoresence assays and to selected antigens
    by ELISA.
  • Monoclonal Antibodies: Sporozoite, liver, and blood stage monoclonal antibodies.
  • Sanaria Custom Services: Sanaria will manufacture Plasmodium species reagents to
    meet client specifications.

Source: Sanaria

“MalariaCube”: A Malaria Education Tool

A large part of helping the fight against malaria is in educating people about causes, treatments and malaria prevention methods.

Malaria is one of the most serious health threats facing the world today. Malaria takes the lives of more than one million people, mostly children five years old and younger, per year and affecting between two and three billion people worldwide.

A Tennessee company has introduced a unique educations tool called MalariaCube. The MalariaCube is a simple and engaging tool that educates viewers on causes, treatment and prevention of malaria. Using pictures to eliminate the language barrier, MalariaCube unfolds to reveal important facts that help identify how to prevent malaria.

The MalariaCube “is a unique and creative approach for educating people about malaria prevention and control,” Dr. K.F. Fischer, MD, MPH, said. “Since there are no words on the Cube, the message can be shared in any language using the information on the package insert. I recommend it.”

Elizabeth Styffe, RN PHN MN and director of Global Orphan Care Initiatives for Saddleback Church and The PEACE Plan, said, “MalariaCube is a simple yet effective resource anyone can use to teach others about malaria.”

More information: MalariaCube

Source: Business Wire

Researchers Show Evidence of Genetic “Arms Race” Against Malaria

For tens of thousands of years, the genomes of malaria parasites and humans have been at war with one another. Now, University of Pennsylvania geneticists, in collaboration with an international team of scientists, have developed a new picture of one way that the human genome has fought back.

The international team was led by Sarah Tishkoff, a Penn Integrates Knowledge professor with appointments in the genetics department in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine and the department of biology in the School of Arts and Sciences, and Wen-Ya Ko, a postdoctoral fellow in the genetics department at the medical school.  They performed a genetic analysis of 15 ethnic groups across Africa, looking for gene variants that could explain differing local susceptibility to malaria.

Malaria remains one of the deadliest diseases on the planet, annually killing about a million people, 90% of whom live in Africa. Different populations show different responses to the parasites that cause malaria; the team conducted the largest cross-population comparison ever on a pair of genes related to malaria’s ability to enter red blood cells.

“When you try to identify the variants that are associated with disease susceptibility, it’s important to do a very fine scale study,” Ko said. “Different populations evolve independently, to a certain degree, so different populations can come up with unique mutations.”

The life cycle of malaria depends on infecting red blood cells by binding to their surfaces, which is why mutations, such as sickle cell anemia, that change the overall shape of those cells are thought to have experienced positive selection.

“Both host and the parasite try to fight back with mutations; it’s a co-evolution arms-race that leaves a signature of selection on the genes,” Ko said. “We’ve identified several single-nucleotide polymorphisms that are candidates for that signature.”

Across the 15 population sets, the researchers focused on polymorphisms in a pair of genes that code for proteins called glycophorin A and glycophorin B. These proteins exist on the surface of red blood cells, and changes to their shape affect the ability of the parasite causing malaria to bind to them and to infect the cells.

There are, however, two conflicting theories of why changes to glycophorin shape influence rates of malaria. One theory suggests that glycophorin A acts as a decoy, making itself more attractive to binding so that pathogens don’t infect more vulnerable cells. Another theory suggests that glycophorin A mutates so that malaria parasites can’t bind at all.

The researchers observed differing patterns of natural selection acting on the different regions of the two genes. They noted an excess of genetic variation being maintained in the region of glycophorin A that plays a critical role of entry of the malaria parasite into the blood cell.

“This signature of selection was strongest in populations that have the highest exposure to malaria,” Tishkoff said.

In addition, the researchers identified a novel protein variant at glycophorin B in several populations with high levels of malaria that may also be a target of natural selection.

Comparisons to chimpanzee and orangutan genomes showed that these mutations occurred after the human lineage split from these closely related primates. But a process known as “gene conversion,” in which similar genes can acquire mutations from one another during cell division, complicates tracking the exact history of the mutation’s spread.

“The genes for glycophorin A and B arose through gene duplication.  They are more than 95 percent similar to each other on the sequence level,” Ko said. “Because they are so similar, sequences of A might bind to B during recombination, which means a mutation that occurs on one can be shared with the other.”

That aspect of gene conversion may be a key to helping humans in the genetic arms race against malaria.

“The parasite’s genome is very highly mutable, and its generation time is short, as compared to humans, so having more mutations more quickly is helpful in keeping up,” Ko said. “This is one tool in the arms race. It may not win the war, but it’s another way to increase variation.”

A better understanding of the interplay between the genes of the malaria parasite and that of its human hosts could also give researchers an artificial advantage — drugs or vaccines — in the fight against the disease.

“Any new information about how malaria infects cells and how humans have evolved natural defense mechanisms against that infection adds to the body of knowledge about the pathology of malaria,” Tishkoff said. “This information could aid in the development of more effective treatments against malaria.”

In addition to Ko and Tishkoff, the research was conducted by Kristin A. Kaercher, Alessia Ranciaro and Jibril B. Hirbo of Penn; Emanuela Giombini and Paolo Marcatili of the Department of Biochemical Sciences at the University of Rome; Alain Froment of the Musee de l’ Homme, Paris: Muntaser Ibrahim of the Department of Molecular Biology and the Institute of Endemic Diseases at the University of Khartoum; Godfrey Lema and Thomas B. Nyambo of the Department of Biochemistry at the Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Sabah A. Omar of the Kenya Medical Research Institute; and Charles Wambebe of International Biomedical Research in Africa in Abuja, Nigeria.

Their research was supported by the Human Frontiers in Science Program, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, and published online in the journal American Journal of Human Genetics today.

Source: Media Newswire

Nothing But Nets Campaign Honors Champions in the Fight Against Malaria

The UN Foundation’s Nothing But Nets campaign—a global, grassroots movement to save lives by preventing malaria—announced Naomi Kodama as the winner of its contest to find the next “Champion” in the fight against malaria. Kodama, a 13-year-old from Chesterfield, MO, received an award on center court during half time of the Chicago Sky home opener, alongside Chicagoan Bryant Barr, who has raised more than $85,000 to send life-saving bed nets to Africa.

Over the past two months, supporters who have raised money and awareness to prevent malaria in Africa were encouraged to share their stories, and vote for their favorites on the organization’s website. Out of hundreds of entries, Barr and Kodama stood out as star supporters, having worked for years to raise thousands of dollars to protect families in Africa through the Nothing But Nets campaign. Malaria is a disease spread by a single mosquito bite. Sleeping under long-lasting, insecticide-treated nets can prevent malaria by up to 90 percent.

“Chicago has been championing the fight against malaria for years,” said Danielle Garrahan, UN Foundation’s Associate Director of Global Partnerships. “We’re proud to have supporters like Naomi and Bryant to help us spread the buzz and save lives from malaria, and excited to have the Chicago Sky join us in honoring them.”

The Chicago Sky offered a ticket promotion for the 2011 home opener, for which $10 of each ticket purchase goes to send a net and save a life through Nothing But Nets. “Fighting malaria is of global importance, and the WNBA and the Chicago Sky have worked with Nothing But Nets to build awareness for the campaign since 2007,” said Adam Fox, Chicago Sky President and CEO. “As part of our continuing commitment to participate in this important cause, we are pleased to recognize two outstanding Champions in the fight against malaria.”

Following the third quarter, two Chicago Sky fans were invited to compete in a shoot out. For every net they made, Junior Chamber International, a partner of Nothing But Nets, donated $10 to the campaign—raising enough to send ten bed nets to Africa.

BACKGROUND

In Africa, every 45 seconds, a child dies from malaria, which is easily prevented through the use of an insecticide-treated net. The nets create a protective barrier against mosquitoes at night, when the vast majority of malaria transmissions occur, and are the most cost-effective method of preventing the spread of the disease. A net costs just $10 to purchase, deliver, and to educate the recipient on its proper use.

Bed nets work: according to The World Health Organization, enough bed nets have been delivered to cover 76 percent of the 765 million people at risk for malaria, and in three years, 11 African countries have cut malaria rates in half.

To date, Nothing But Nets has raised more than $35 million to distribute more than 4 million nets to families throughout Africa. For more information, please visit http://www.NothingButNets.net.

Source: PR Web

Mobile Phone Technologies Used to Help Track Malaria Outbreaks

On the heels of the United Nations Social Innovation Summit, HP and nonprofit organization Positive Innovation for the Next Generation (PING) are launching a collaboration to improve the quality and efficiency of disease surveillance in Botswana through mobile health monitoring technology that can enhance protection and prevention against major malaria outbreaks.

“We’re focused on addressing health and development problems by not only using technology in an innovative way, but also by creating more problem solvers in the local population. By combining our socially active core with innovation and business acumen from HP, and the scale of government organizations, we can achieve the greatest opportunity for lasting social change,” says PING operations director Katy Digovich.

Advancing the country toward its goal of malaria elimination, the initiative uses HP webOS and cloud computing technology to enable health workers to more efficiently predict, observe and minimize the harm caused by outbreaks.

According to Gabriele Zedlmayer, vice president, Office of Global Social Innovation at HP, “there is tremendous opportunity for mobile technology to transform public health services in both developing and developed markets. The full potential of applying mobile and cloud services to advance healthcare has yet to be reached, and we’re committed to applying our technology expertise to help address some of the world’s most difficult global health challenges.”

In partnership with the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) and mobile network provider MASCOM, the program equips healthcare workers in Botswana with HP Palm Pre 2 smartphones to collect malaria data, notify the Ministry of Health about outbreaks and tag both data and disease surveillance information with GPS coordinates. This data will contribute to a first-ever geographic map of disease transmission in the country, enabling faster response times and better measurement of malaria cases to monitor treatment and scale up the distribution of mosquito nets.

The program’s year-long pilot phase is the largest mobile health pilot program in Botswana, running throughout the malaria season. Future programs are planned to reach additional outbreak-prone diseases in the region.

  • Data analysis in the cloud: The initiative enables healthcare workers to collect data via a webOS application on a mobile device, upload the data over a mobile network, and analyze and share the data via the cloud. Through this system, analysis now takes hours rather than weeks to complete.
  • Rapid outbreak notification: When an outbreak is detected, healthcare workers can quickly upload specific case and location information from their mobile devices in the field. Health officers in the area and members of the Ministry of Health then receive a text message alerting them of the outbreak, enabling rapid deployment of preventative measures to reduce disease transmission.
  • Higher accuracy with real-time surveys: Through the flexibility and ease of development on the webOS platform, a surveillance application enables health workers to perform real-time surveys from the field. Health workers are able to enter accurate, context-rich data through pictures, video, audio, GPS coordinates, qualitative and quantitative information about the case.

In the next phase of the program, HP and PING plan to develop a cloud-based health services package for consumers in Botswana, creating a sustainable system for delivering even more health-related information to users over mobile networks.

Advancing health monitoring

Despite progress in disease eradication, the World Health Organization reports that more than 780,000 people died from malaria-related illnesses in 2009, most of them children under the age of five. In Africa, 75 million people, or 10 percent of the population, are at risk to contract malaria.(1) Mobile technology has the potential to drastically improve malaria surveillance by speeding data collection and generating more context-aware information about outbreaks.

Health initiatives in Africa

As part of the company’s global social innovation program, HP aims to enrich society by using the breadth and scale of its technology to drive structural, systemic improvements in health access and delivery.

In addition to the collaboration with PING, HP has alliances with African social enterprise mPedigree to fight counterfeit malaria drugs through an innovative mobile phone and cloud services solution; nonprofit organization mothers2mothers to help prevent HIV transmission from mothers to infants; and the CHAI to greatly improve the speed of HIV diagnosis for infants in Kenya.

Source:  BusinessWire

Hewlett-Packard To Test Mobile Technology in Botswana Clinical Trials

For years Hewlett-Packard has been equated with computers and printers. The company is looking to be a player in a new era of mobile health monitoring.

H.P. said on Monday that it was beginning a yearlong clinical trial in Botswana that will equip doctors and nurses with Palm Pre 2 smartphones and an application that is designed to collect information about malaria outbreaks.

Read more, via NYTimes.com.

Scientists Offer 2020 Vision of Vaccines for Malaria, TB & HIV/AIDS

Collectively, malaria, TB & HIV/AIDS cause more than five million deaths per year – nearly the entire population of the state of Washington – and represent one of the world’s major public health challenges as we move into the second decade of the 21st century. In the May 26, 2011, edition of the premier scientific journal Nature, Seattle BioMed Director Alan Aderem, Ph.D., along with Rino Rappuoli, Ph.D., Global Head of Vaccines Research for Novartis Vaccines & Diagnostics, discuss recent advances in vaccine development, along with new tools including systems biology and structure-based antigen design that could lead to a deeper understanding of mechanisms of protection. This, in turn, will illuminate the path to rational vaccine development to lift the burden of the world’s most devastating infectious diseases.

According to Aderem, a systems biology pioneer who recently joined Seattle BioMed to incorporate that approach with the Institute’s infectious disease research, new conceptional and technological advances indicate that it will be possible to develop vaccines for the “big three” infectious diseases within the next 10 years. “Success will be largely dependent on our ability to use novel approaches such as systems biology to analyze data sets generated during proof-of-concept trials,” he explained. “This will lead to new insights such as the identification of correlates of protection or signatures of immunogenicity and the acceleration of large-scale clinical trials.” Aderem added that innovative, new clinical and regulatory approaches will also accelerate the pathway to much-needed vaccines.

The article discusses the strengths and criticisms of the systems biology approach, with the key strength of the approach lying in its ability to capture and integrate massive amounts of biological data to visualize emergent properties that are not demonstrated by their individual parts and cannot be predicted from the parts alone. “The power of systems biology comes from its capacity to predict the behavior of an entire biological system,” Aderem said. “From there, we can optimize vaccine candidates and predict whether a drug or vaccine candidate can work before it moves into large scale, very expensive clinical trials.”

Systems biology can also be used to speed the often lengthy clinical trial experience. Aderem and Rappuoli estimate that in trials of new vaccines for malaria, TB and HIV/AIDS, only one hypothesis has been tested every eight years in the past three decades. “We cannot afford this approach if we want to have an impact on disease in a reasonable timeframe,” Aderem said. “We can accelerate clinical development by performing more efficacy trials and by improving their design using systems biology approaches to test several hypotheses in parallel and having an adaptive design to expand the outcomes that prove most promising.”

Aderem and Rappuoli also debunk one of the key criticisms of systems biology – that it is overly reliant on computation. “Much of this comes from a misunderstanding on the role of computers in systems biology,” Aderem explained. “Computers are not expected to come up with biological insights from the outset, but are meant to facilitate an integration of discovery science with hypothesis-driven science to yield a holistic description of a biological system.”

While progress has been made over the past few years in the development of novel vaccines against the three most challenging infectious diseases in the world, Aderem and Rappuoli conclude that innovative design of clinical trials, testing several vaccines in parallel and getting early information using systems biology approaches will accelerate vaccine development and increase understanding of the human immune system.

Source: Seattle Biomedical Research Institute (Seattle BioMed)

Nigeria Government May Ban Mono-Therapy Malaria Drugs

Nigeria’s Federal Government has hinted that in the near future, it would ban all mono-therapy drugs used in malaria treatment in Nigeria as they are no longer effective following resistance of the drugs by Nigerians.

The Minister of Health, Professor Oyebuchi Chukwu dropped the hint during a dinner with journalists held in Lagos. The dinner was part of activities commemorating World Malaria Day, which is marked April 25th every year. Mono-therapy malaria drugs contain only Artemisinin and are commonly used in treating malaria.

Read more, via allAfrica.com.

Insecticidal Building Panels May Help Fight Malaria

GreenWorld Development, Inc. has announced that the company is  in joint venture discussions to build affordable and environmentally friendly housing in Sub-Sahara Africa that would employ a unique technology to ferment and impregnate building panels and building blocks with anti-mosquito repellents.

“Malaria remains to be a major threat to mankind worldwide, especially in Africa,” GreenWorld-CEO Leo J. Heinl says. “In Kenya, every year 34,000 of children in the age of five and younger die because of Malaria – about 100 per day. We at GreenWorld trust that this technology will become a major step in the fight against malaria.”

The repellent will be made available to building contractors, government and health organizations.

The toxin, which the company says is not dangerous to humans, will need to be replenished every 2 years.

GreenWorld Development, Inc. develops products to support the “Smart Green Economy.”  The company’s main focus is pharmaceutical/healthcare, carbon emission technologies and trading, R&D in alternative, sustainable, innovative, competitive and environmentally friendly technologies along with emerging market consultancy.

Source: BusinessWire