They will study mother-to-child HIV transmission in Malawi, malaria prevention in Ghana.

Danielle Wickman, UC Riverside

Three first-year students in the UCR/UCLA Thomas Haider Program in Biomedical Sciences at the University of California, Riverside, are headed to Africa next month to gain first-hand experience in working with patients with HIV and malaria. After spending a month there, the students — all women — will return to the United States, where they hope to apply the knowledge gained from working in African clinics to medically underserved areas, such as inland Southern California.

Danielle Wickman and Virginia Tancioco have been selected to participate in the UCLA Global Health Program in Malawi. They leave on June 4 and return on July 13. Judy Gbadebo was selected to participate in the UCLA Global Health Program in Ghana. She leaves on June 19 and returns on July 22.

Wickman, 23, was part of the University Honors program at UCR. She has not been to Africa before, and expects her trip to Malawi will increase her passion for working in women’s health issues. Along with Tancioco, she will work on a project that focuses on preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV. Specifically, they will study, along with Dr. Risa Hoffman, an assistant clinical professor of medicine at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, the effectiveness of antiretrovirals that are part of a World Health Organization treatment plan to prevent HIV transmission.

“HIV-positive pregnant women in Malawi are using — or are expected to be using — these medications,” said Wickman, a first generation college student, who plans to specialize in obstetrics and gynecology. “But a large number of them stop using them for reasons we would like to study. We want to understand the effectiveness of these medications, and look into how many women are able to follow up and take all the medication after the initial visit to the clinic.

“We will be working in Malawi’s capital, Lilongwe, with Partners in Hope, while using as our home base the main hospital in Nkhoma, where we will work with patients at the hospital and in outpatient clinics, in addition to conducting home visits in villages to evaluate access to care,” Wickman added. “We will also investigate male partner involvement, meaning how many male partners are involved in the treatment process. A good number of men in Malawi feel powerless when they find out their partners have contracted HIV and find it easier to simply walk away.”

Virginia Tancioco, UC Riverside

Tancioco, 30, a student also of the five-year dual degree UCLA PRIME Medical School Program, said Malawi appealed to her because of her interest in public health.

“Malawi offers me an opportunity to work with an underserved population — another of my interests,” said Tancioco, who is considering a career in emergency medicine. “Many pregnant women in Malawi are not taking the medication that prevents transmission of HIV to their unborn children. Is this cultural? Is it a mistrust of doctors? A fear of them? Are the clinics too far and inaccessible? Are the drugs unaffordable? We would like to find out.”

She expects the trip also will help her appreciate things she takes for granted in the United States.

“Here, you switch on a light, and there it is,” she said. “In Malawi, some villages lack electricity. I expect this trip will be an invaluable learning experience for me in that sense as well.”

Hoffman, who co-directs the Global Health Education Program at UCLA, said Wickman and Tancioco were chosen for their passion for serving underprivileged populations, as well as their maturity, cultural competency and enthusiasm for global health.

“Over the summer in Malawi, Danielle and Virginia will be collecting important information to help improve access and adherence to care for women of reproductive age living with HIV,” she said. “They will have the opportunity to learn about HIV care in Malawi, a country ranked among the poorest in the world, and will be making important contributions to our knowledge of specific issues related to treatment of HIV-positive women in rural Malawian communities. I hope this experience will further strengthen their desire to work in global health and that they will return to Southern California better able to serve the diverse UCLA-UCR community because of their unique opportunity.”

Judy Gbadebo, UC Riverside

Gbadebo, 26, is no stranger to global health. She spent six months in South Africa in 2009, working directly with TB and HIV patients while examining patient care in underserved populations.

In Ghana she will focus on malaria prevention efforts for children and families in the village of Sorano. In collaboration with the Ghana Health and Education Initiative, she will examine the usage rates of insecticide treated nets and facilitate community education to reduce the transmission of infection.

“Although I enjoyed working with patients one-on-one in South Africa, I returned from the experience wanting to help patients on a larger scale and create sustainable change,” Gbadebo said. “Malaria is a devastating problem in Ghana, but through widespread education and standardized preventative solutions, it is quite solvable. I hope my research there will make an impact on the community that will generate long-lasting results. I expect my work abroad will improve my understanding of how to implement patient education and awareness as an avenue of preventative medicine.”

Dr. Emma Simmons, the associate dean for student affairs at the UCR School of Medicine, believes Gbadebo is perfect for the internship in Ghana.

“Judy is passionate about global medicine and helping the underserved,” she said. “She is also not naïve to the challenges that she will face during this internship. She has already had some insights into the politics and gravity of health care delivery in developing countries and she is determined to continue to do her part, at every level of her training in medicine, to make a sustainable impact. Her focus and commitment to study the behavioral and societal factors that influence the spread of infectious diseases, specifically malaria, in Ghana is a testament to that.”

Finding their passion

Wickman, who attended Murrieta Valley High School, is grateful that UCR gave her opportunities to find her passion.

“It was in a class I took at UCR on global health and agriculture development in developing countries that I found myself reading up on women’s health issues,” she said. “It got me interested in empowering women to create change in their communities and be invested in health and well being.”

UCR gave Tancioco the opportunity to get to know professors in a smaller and more intimate program.

“To my surprise, I was able to directly approach my professors for letters of recommendation,” said Tancioco, who attended James Logan High School in Union City. “I had expected hurdles to jump over and very limited access.”

The UCR School of Medicine’s mission of serving an underserved population appeals strongly to Gbadebo, who attended Foothill High School in Pleasanton.

“A health care disparities course through the Medical Scholars Program at UCR exposed me to a variety of issues in health disparities,” said Gbadebo, who will be joined in Ghana by a student at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine.  “It is here that my passion for global health and forming parallels in my own local community flourished.”

Vaccine development among focuses of new research center at UC San Diego.

Most people know by now that algae are a promising source of biofuels that could supplement and eventually replace the world’s declining reserves of oil.

But UC San Diego biologists working on algal biofuels who joined forces with another team at the School of Medicine studying tropical diseases have discovered another use for algae. They’ve found that these single-celled green factories, often dismissed as “pond scum,” are capable of inexpensively producing vaccines that might be able to protect the 2 billion people on the planet at risk for developing malaria.

Mosquitoes transmit the protozoan that causes malaria.

The researchers published their findings in mid-May, just days after concluding a three-day conference that brought some 300 plant geneticists from around the country here to discuss ways of using plant genomics to improve agriculture and the production of renewable transportation fuels to sustain the world’s rapidly growing population.

“We’re half way through our total reserves of oil,” explained Stephen Mayfield, professor of biology and director of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology, at the symposium. “How do we sustain the 7 billion people on the planet with declining oil reserves? How are we going to initiate the Green Revolution 2.0? We need to use genomics.”

Mayfield is co-director of the Center for Food & Fuel for the 21st Century, a new Organized Research Unit that sponsored the three-day symposium and will be bringing together researchers from across the campus to develop renewable ways of improving the nation’s food, fuel, pharmaceutical and other bio-based industries. He also headed the team of biologists that discovered the potential malaria vaccine, demonstrating that the new campus initiatives designed to stimulate interdisciplinary research can lead not only to major discoveries in improving energy, but key advancements in health, food and the environment.

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UCSF, UC San Diego team finds approved drug that could block key cause of dysentery.

James McKerrow, UC San Francisco

>>Related: UC San Diego release

A team of researchers from UC San Francisco and UC San Diego has identified an approved arthritis drug that is effective against amoebas in lab and animal studies, suggesting it could offer a low-dose, low cost treatment for the amoebic infections that cause human dysentery throughout the world.

Based on these results, the team has received Orphan Drug Status for the drug, known as auranofin, from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and has applied for approval to start clinical trials to treat both amebiasis and the parasite Giardia intestinalis in humans.

The findings, which showed that auranofin inhibited growth of the parasite Entamoeba histolytica in lab tests as well as two rodent models of the disease, highlight the importance of screening existing drugs for new purposes, especially for neglected diseases, the researchers said. Findings will be reported in the June 2012 issue of Nature Medicine and were selected for advance online publication on the Nature website.

The combination of an off-patent drug and decades of clinical safety data offers the possibility of providing a lower-cost solution worldwide with fewer side effects or risks of bacterial resistance than the current therapy, according to co-senior author James McKerrow, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of pathology in the UCSF Sandler Center for Drug Discovery.

Sharon Reed, UC San Diego

“When we’re looking for new treatments for the developing world, we start with drugs that have already been approved,” said McKerrow, who co-authored the paper with Sharon Reed, M.D., of UC San Diego and first author Anjan Debnath, Ph.D., of UCSF. “If we can find an approved drug that happens to kill these organisms, we’ve leapfrogged the development process that goes into assessing whether they are safe, which also makes them affordable throughout the world.”

Each year, 50 million people worldwide contract amebiasis through contaminated food or water, making it the third leading cause of illness and fourth leading cause of death due to protozoan infections worldwide. Most of the 70,000 deaths each year are in developing countries, where children are at greatest risk of severe illness. While less deadly than amoebas, Giardia is the most frequent parasitic agent of intestinal disease worldwide, causing an estimated 280 million cases annually, including also infects between 6 percent and 8 percent of all children in developing countries, and more than 19,000 Americans.

Both amebiasis and giardiasis are currently treated with the antibiotic metronidazole, which has side effects that include nausea, vomiting, dizziness and headache.

The new drug, auranofin, has been used as a twice-daily oral therapy for adults with rheumatoid arthritis since 1985, and has been shown to be safe at that dosage. The researchers’ laboratory studies indicated that auranofin would be about ten times more potent than the current treatment for dysentery, meaning it could be given at low dose, and on a one-time or limited basis.

“This is a drug that you can find in every country,” said Debnath, a postdoctoral fellow at UCSF who led the research and is first author on the paper. “Based on the dosage we’re seeing in the lab, this treatment could be sold at about $2.50 per dose, or lower. That cost savings could make a big difference to the people who need it the most.”

The research stemmed from a joint effort among several labs at UCSF that are affiliated with the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) on UCSF’s Mission Bay campus, as well as with the pathology departments in UC San Diego and in the Instituto Politecnico Nacional, in Mexico.

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More than 100 attend UCSF event.

Elizabeth Mertz, UC San Francisco

UC San Francisco School of Dentistry‘s Global Oral Health Symposium 2012 repeated and expanded on the success of last year’s inaugural event, bringing greater visibility to vital oral health issues worldwide, and the extraordinary international effort to address them.

Nearly 100 campus and visiting participants — including some from China, Germany and India — attended the second annual Global Oral Health Day and Symposium at UCSF on April 23.

“This second event confirms UCSF’s leading role on global oral health,” says John S. Greenspan, B.Sc., B.D.S., Ph.D., associate dean for global oral health at UCSF, which aims to improve oral and craniofacial health worldwide.

Named to lead UCSF’s Global Oral Health program in October 2010, Greenspan is working to build, strengthen and coordinate activities in global oral health, develop and support programs of excellence in global oral health sciences and international health within the school, and interact with UCSF campus, systemwide and other initiatives in global health through educational, research and public service programs.

This year’s symposium, themed “Workforce Issues for Global Oral Health,” featured a keynote speech by Jaime Sepulveda, M.D., M.P.H., Dr.Sc., director of global health   sciences, who discussed the Lancet Commission’s November 2010 report on the education of health professionals.

The Lancet Commission report, was critical of the state of professional health education today, which it found to be “fragmented, outdated, and static curricula that produce ill-equipped graduates.”

“That is why this commission, consisting of 20 professional and academic leaders from diverse countries, came together to develop a shared vision and a common strategy for postsecondary education in medicine, nursing and public health that reaches beyond the confines of national borders and the silos of individual professions. The commission adopted a global outlook, a multiprofessional perspective, and a systems approach,” the report states.

UCSF Global Health Sciences (GHS) is also taking a global outlook to improve the education of health professionals and address health disparities. Last September, GHS hosted a symposium, “Transforming Health Education Globally,” which coincided with Sepulveda’s first week at UCSF and built on the initiatives conceived at a 2007 forum that he led at UCSF.

Sepulveda wants to make global health an integral part of interprofessional health education and to boost support for the institutions that educate health professionals in other countries. “GHS is poised to take on an increasingly important role in this effort, in the same way that UCSF and San Francisco have been renowned for 30 years for the world-class model they developed to combat HIV/AIDS,” Sepulveda said in the GHS annual report [PDF].

Addressing oral health around the globe

Dean Tao Xu of Peking University’s School of Stomatology explored recent changes and future trends in oral health in China. Daniel Davidson, D.M.D., president of the California Dental Association (CDA), discussed the November 2011 CDA report on access to care.

Research shows that nearly 10 million Californians — including low-income children, the elderly and people with disabilities — face barriers to accessing the dental care they need, the CDA report states. “Barriers are multifactorial, influenced by economics, culture, education and geography — a complex problem with no single solution.”

The CDA’s report, “Phased Strategies for Reducing the Barriers to Dental Care in California,” [PDF] outlines a three-phased approach, each with multiple recommendations to establish state orgal health leadership, focus on prevention and early intervention for children and an innovative dental delivery system to expand capacity in California.

And Habib Benzian from Germany, senior advisor of Fit for School in the Philippines and director of the Health Bureau Global Health Consultants, shared broad insights into global oral care workforce issues.

UCSF speakers were Peter Loomer, D.D.S., Ph.D., an assistant professor of periodontology in the UCSF Department of Orofacial Sciences, and Susan Fisher-Owens, M.D., M.P.H., an assistant clinical professor in the UCSF School of Medicine’s Department of Pediatrics.

Bruce Donoff, D.M.D., M.D., dean of the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, oriented the group to the program in global oral health that he is building at Harvard.

Following the panel discussion that concluded the day, UCSF School of Dentistry’s Caroline Shibosk, D.D.S., M.P.H., Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Orofacial Sciences, was recognized with the Faculty Award for Achievement in Global Oral Health, and UCSF Dentistry Graduate Program D.D.S./Ph.D. student Benjamin Chaffee was recognized with the Student Award for Achievement in Global Oral Health.

Related link:
UCSF Dentistry | Global Oral Health

UC president honors student group that has helped Haiti recover from 2010 quake.

A student-led effort to help rebuild Haiti after the January 2010 earthquake that devastated the country was chosen as the winner of this year’s UC President’s Award for Outstanding Student Leadership.

The UC Haiti Initiative, which has student members on all 10 campuses, works with the Université d’État d’Haïti, the State University of Haiti, on projects designed to reinforce the public higher education system and to spur social innovation in the country.

“The UC Haiti Initiative is an example of a promising practice not only within the UC community, but within the global community,” UC President Mark Yudof said in prepared remarks delivered by Nathan Brostrom, UC executive vice president for business operations, at Wednesday’s (May 16) UC Board of Regents meeting in Sacramento. “Its efforts stand tall in the long, distinguished tradition of public service that defines this university.”

Tu Tran (second from right) and Kenny Pettersen (third from right) discuss engineering projects with students and alumni from Université d'État d'Haïti.

Chancellors from UC Riverside, UC Berkeley, UCLA and UC Santa Barbara nominated UCHI for the award. Co-founders Nicolas Pascal and Noah Stern are being presented with the award at Wednesday’s meeting.

“Thanks to the support UCHI has received from the UC Office of the President and UC chancellors, UCHI has been able to establish itself as a fixture within the UC, and a positive force for change in Haiti,” said Stern, a UC Berkeley graduate and former campus student government president.

UCHI takes a novel approach to sustainable development in Haiti by brokering peer-to-peer projects in collaboration with the Université d’État d’Haïti (UEH). Through this approach, UCHI leverages the talent and resources of all University of California campuses into a bilateral partnership with the UEH community.

Students, faculty, staff and doctors from UC have traveled to Haiti on aid and development missions, and chapters of the UCHI have formed on each UC campus.

Some of the UC Haiti Initiative’s ongoing projects include:

• An inter-university debate competition focused on Haitian redevelopment projects
• A disaster-response training project to equip medical students with emergency and pre-hospital medicine skills required before their social service residency.
• Skill-building programs to train future faculty members who will teach at UEH.

The academic and entrepreneurial talent in the UC system “can be a powerful development cluster,” said Pascal, chair of UCHI’s steering committee who graduated from UC Santa Barbara with a master’s degree in global studies and international development.

The focus on public higher education and social entrepreneurship were chosen because they are two areas that play to UC’s strengths and can be effective models for mutual development between campuses and Haiti, Pascal said.

“We wanted to do what we could to channel our efforts and plug in a niche where we could serve the public good,” he said.

UCHI was created after an April 2010 meeting at UCSF of more than 200 UC students, faculty, staff and others interested in helping rebuild Haiti. Among the meeting organizers was Tu Tran, who then was a UC Berkeley student.

Tran said he was spurred by his family’s experience of being displaced to do something to help Haiti. He was born in a refugee camp in Thailand and might have died if it weren’t for volunteer doctors.

“If it wasn’t for Doctors Without Borders, my mother and I wouldn’t be here today,” said Tran, whose family fled Vietnam for the United States toward the end of the Vietnam War. “I was given a second chance in life.”

The experience instilled in Tran a desire to pursue a medical career so that he could help others. He is now the country coordinator for UCHI and has spent most of the last year in Haiti organizing the group’s efforts.

The support of students, faculty, staff and chancellors at all campuses and the UC Office of the President got the ball rolling, but the work has just begun, Pascal said.

“We want to take these nascent bonds that we’ve established and continue to pull them toward Haiti,” he said.

UCHI’s founders say they’re dedicated to help Haiti over the long haul even though they’ve all graduated from college.

“We do have this lifelong commitment to Haiti. We’ve made so many great friends in Haiti through our work. We feel tied to it for a long, long time,” said Will Smelko, another co-founder of the initiative who graduated from UC Berkeley and also is a former president of the campus’s student government.

Added Pascal, “This is going to be our life’s journey. I don’t think anybody is going to be able to forget this experience.”

Related links:
UC Haiti Initiative on Facebook
UC Haiti Relief on Facebook

Algae could provide inexpensive means for developing vaccine to protect billions of people.

Biologists at the University of California, San Diego, have succeeded in engineering algae to produce potential candidates for a vaccine that would prevent transmission of the parasite that causes malaria, an achievement that could pave the way for the development of an inexpensive way to protect billions of people from one of the world’s most prevalent and debilitating diseases. Initial proof-of-principle experiments suggest that such a vaccine could prevent malaria transmission.

Malaria is a mosquito-borne disease caused by infection with protozoan parasites from the genus Plasmodium. It affects more than 225 million people worldwide in tropical and subtropical regions, resulting in fever, headaches and in severe cases coma and death. While a variety of often costly antimalarial medications are available to travelers in those regions to protect against infections, a vaccine offering a high level of protection from the disease does not yet exist.

The use of algae to produce malaria proteins that elicited antibodies against Plasmodium falciparum in laboratory mice and prevented malaria transmission was published today in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE. The development resulted from an unusual interdisciplinary collaboration between two groups  of biologists at UC San Diego — one from the Division of Biological Sciences and San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology, which had been engineering algae to produce bio-products and biofuels, and another from the Center for Tropical Medicine and Emerging Infectious Diseases in the School of Medicine that is working to develop ways to diagnose, prevent and treat malaria.

Part of the difficulty in creating a vaccine against malaria is that it requires a system that can produce complex, three-dimensional proteins that resemble those made by the parasite, thus eliciting antibodies that disrupt malaria transmission. Most vaccines created by engineered bacteria are relatively simple proteins that stimulate the body’s immune system to produce antibodies against bacterial invaders. More complex proteins can be produced, but this requires an expensive process using mammalian cell cultures, and the proteins those cells produce are coated with sugars due to a chemical process called glycosylation.

“Malaria is caused by a parasite that makes complex proteins, but for whatever reason this parasite doesn’t put sugars on those proteins,” said Stephen Mayfield, a professor of biology at UC San Diego who headed the research effort. “If you have a protein covered with sugars and you inject it into somebody as a vaccine, the tendency is to make antibodies against the sugars, not the amino acid backbone of the protein from the invading organism you want to inhibit. Researchers have made vaccines without these sugars in bacteria and then tried to refold them into the correct three-dimensional configuration, but that’s an expensive proposition and it doesn’t work very well.”

Instead, the biologists looked to produce their proteins with the help of an edible green alga, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, used widely in research laboratories as a genetic model organism, much like the fruit fly Drosophila and the bacterium E. coli. Two years ago, a UC San Diego team of biologists headed by Mayfield, who is also the director of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology, a research consortium seeking to develop transportation fuels from algae, published a landmark study demonstrating that many complex human therapeutic proteins, such as monoclonal antibodies and growth hormones, could be produced by Chlamydomonas.

That got James Gregory, a postdoctoral researcher in Mayfield’s laboratory, wondering if a complex protein to protect against the malarial parasite could also be produced by Chlamydomonas. Two billion people live in regions where malaria is present, making the delivery of a malarial vaccine a costly and logistically difficult proposition, especially when that vaccine is expensive to produce. So the UC San Diego biologists set out to determine if this alga, an organism that can produce complex proteins very cheaply, could produce malaria proteins that would inhibit infections from malaria.

“It’s too costly to vaccinate 2 billion people using current technologies,” explained Mayfield. “Realistically, the only way a malaria vaccine will ever be used is if it can be produced at a fraction of the cost of current vaccines.  Algae have this potential because you can grow algae any place on the planet in ponds or even in bathtubs.”

Collaborating with Joseph Vinetz, a professor of medicine at UC San Diego and a leading expert in tropical diseases who has been working on developing vaccines against malaria, the researchers showed that the proteins produced by the algae, when injected into laboratory mice, made antibodies that blocked malaria transmission from mosquitoes.

“It’s hard to say if these proteins are perfect, but the antibodies to our algae-produced protein recognize the native proteins in malaria and, inside the mosquito, block the development of the malaria parasite so that the mosquito can’t transmit the disease,” said Gregory.

“This paper tells us two things: The proteins that we made here are viable vaccine candidates and that we at least have the opportunity to produce enough of this vaccine that we can think about inoculating 2 billion people,” said Mayfield. “In no other system could you even begin to think about that.”

The scientists, who filed a patent application on their discovery, said the next steps are to see if these algae proteins work to protect humans from malaria and then to determine if they can modifiy the proteins to elicit the same antibody response when the algae are eaten rather than injected.

Other UC San Diego scientists involved in the discovery were Fengwu Li from Vinetz’s laboratory and biologists Lauren Tomosada, Chesa Cox and Aaron Topol from Mayfield’s group. The basic technology that led to the development was supported by the Skaggs family. The research was supported by grants from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the San Diego Foundation.  The California Energy Commission supported work on recombinant protein production for biofuels use, and this technology helped enabled these studies.

The PLoS ONE article can be accessed at http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0037179.

UCSF hosts Bay Area World Malaria Day Symposium.

Malaria might be eliminated from countries it has plagued for centuries, according to malaria experts who gathered for the Bay Area World Malaria Day Symposium on April 25 at the UC San Francisco Mission Bay campus.

Laboratory researchers, inventors, drug developers, public health professionals and advocates came to discuss the innovations and dedication needed to accomplish such an ambitious task. Currently, more than 200 million people worldwide are infected with the mosquito-borne parasite that causes malaria.

Keynote speaker Jay Keasling, Ph.D., a UC Berkeley professor and associate director of the Physical Biosciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is an expert in synthetic biology, research in which microbes are turned into factories to improve production of useful chemicals.

Keasling described how the most effective antimalarial drug — artemisinin — now can be made not only by farmers, but also with the aid of brewer’s yeast, which through the wonders of synthetic biology has been re-engineered to cheaply churn out the key ingredient.

Keasling founded a company, Amyris, which has pioneered the use of microbes that make artemisinic acid, a precursor of artemisinin, and he talked about further advances in making the drug.

Artemisinin now is coupled with other treatments in combination therapies aimed at lessening the likelihood that the malaria parasite will develop drug resistance.

Scale-up of artemisinin manufacturing by Sanofi is under way, the result of a partnership that includes Amyris, the nonprofit drug-development program One World Health, The Bill and Malinda Gates Foundation and UC Berkeley, among others.

Sanofi is gearing up to make up to 45 tons of artemisinin in 2013, and more in later years. According to Elena Pantjushenko, external affairs associate for One World Health, the goal is to achieve an adequate supply at a fair-market price below the current market price, but still high enough to keep farmers in the market.

Malaria control and innovation

In other research, scientists have been inventing portable, inexpensive tools, such as apps for cell phones, to aid in diagnosis and disease tracking in the field. Other speakers described drug discovery efforts aimed at finding unexploited vulnerabilities in the form of the parasite that invades human blood cells.

Counterfeit drugs have hampered malaria control efforts. Peter Wong, chief operating officer for TruTag Technologies Inc., described how the company is using an FDA-accepted substance, silica, as an authenticity label to thwart drug counterfeiters.

UCSF assistant professor of medicine Bryan Greenhouse, M.D., described strategies for tracking genetic changes in the malaria parasite in human populations to make better public health decisions about how to focus malaria control efforts. The method has been used to track other diseases, and Greenhouse now has begun to successfully use it to track new malaria cases in Zanzibar.

Several speakers described the implementation of campaigns, programs and policies. These include advocacy campaigns and resources to increase awareness of malaria, domestic and international programs that build capacity for malaria prevention, and policy recommendations to sustain the gains in malaria control and elimination.

Like the Avon ladies of yesteryear, 700 sellers are going door to door in Uganda, offering malaria screening along with soap, cleaning supplies and other household items. In other non-profit efforts, sports teams in the United States are gathering money for bed nets, while faith-based groups are organizing their own contributions to malaria control efforts.

Recently, there has been a greater than 50 percent reduction in malaria cases and deaths in several sub-Saharan African nations where malaria control efforts have been sustained for many years.

UCSF Global Health group researchers Gavin Yamey, M.D., M.P.H., and Chris Cotter, M.P.H., described research showing that lapses in control efforts have historically played a larger role than other factors in driving malaria resurgences and cited funding reduction as a major threat to recent successes in controlling the disease.

Michele Barry, M.D., the senior associate dean of global health and director of the Center for Innovation in Global Health at Stanford University, offered closing remarks.

During an interview before the symposium Barry said, “Mostly, we have talked about suppressing or controlling malaria. We haven’t really talked about eradication. I think this conference brings together a group of people in the Bay Area who are working on ways to eradicate malaria.”

Jaime Sepulveda, M.D., M.P.H., D.Sc., the executive director of UCSF Global Health Sciences and a former director of Mexico’s National Institutes for Health, opened the symposium and called for greater efforts on the part of the Bay Area community of researchers and advocates to strengthen their impact in fighting the disease internationally.

Related links:
The UCSF Global Health Group Malaria Elimination Initiative

Malaria resurgence directly linked to funding cuts

Malaria discovery gives hope for new drugs and vaccines

UCSF leads Lancet series on malaria elimination

Gates Foundation funds Breast Milk, Gut Microbiome and Immunity Project.

Researchers at the University of California, Davis, will join in an international research effort to develop new ways to diagnose, treat and prevent malnutrition in infants and children around the world.

The Breast Milk, Gut Microbiome and Immunity Project is funded by $8.3 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and will be led by the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. UC Davis will receive $1.1 million of the total.

The UC Davis researchers who will participate in the project are nutritionist Kathryn Dewey and microbiologist David Mills.

Severe malnutrition has long been thought to stem simply from a lack of adequate food. But now scientists understand the condition is far more complex and may involve a breakdown in the way gut microbial communities process various components of the diet.

The community of intestinal microbes and its vast collection of genes, known as the gut microbiome, is assembled right from birth and influenced by babies’ early environments and the first foods they consume, such as breast milk.

Through the Breast Milk, Gut Microbiome and Immunity Project, scientists will evaluate the relationship among first foods, the developing community of microbes in the intestine, and the developing immune system.

The new research builds on ongoing clinical studies in Africa, South Asia and South America of malnourished and healthy infants and children and their mothers; the Gates Foundation also funds those studies.

“This multidisciplinary project will allow us to expand our understanding of how to prevent infant malnutrition, which is a major focus of the UC Davis Program in International and Community Nutrition,” Dewey said. “The results of these experiments will provide critical information about whether the lipid-based nutrient supplements that we are evaluating in ongoing research have an influence on the collection of microorganisms in the human gut, which will help us understand the impact of our interventions on child growth.”

As director of the International Lipid-Based Nutrient Supplements Project, Dewey is involved with two projects in Malawi that are providing biological samples for the newly funded research consortium. More information about the lipid-based nutrient supplement project is available at: http://ilins.org.

As part of the new project, Mills and his colleagues at the UC Davis Foods for Health Institute will examine the complex, protective sugars in breast milk and characterize specific bacteria in the guts of these infants. The researchers also will look for similar protective sugars in existing dairy products.

“This project will identify specific milk components from commercial dairy streams, which — in combination with milk-responsive bacteria — may extend the natural protection of mother’s milk past weaning to a fragile population of children who desperately need that protection,” Mills said.

“The opportunity to deliver diet-based solutions in the near term – sourcing from commercial milk operations – is truly exciting, ” he said.

More information about the UC Davis Foods for Health Institute is available at http://ffhi.ucdavis.edu.

The overall project will be led by Jeffrey I. Gordon at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Doctors, others share sad stories of childbirth worldwide at screening of former supermodel’s film at UCLA.

Former supermodel turned filmmaker Christy Turlington Burns

Somewhere on the planet, there’s a woman facing death in the midst of giving life.

Roughly 1,000 women die each day due to pregnancy-related causes. For every woman who dies, there are 20 to 30 more who will suffer from lifelong disabilities caused by childbirth.

Less than a week before Mother’s Day, former supermodel Christy Turlington Burns was at UCLA to discuss these issues and to share her gripping directorial debut, “No Woman, No Cry,” which chronicles the stories of at-risk pregnant women from four parts of the world — a remote Maasai tribe in Tanzania, a Bangladesh slum, a post-abortion-care ward in Guatemala and a prenatal clinic in the U.S.

The screening, held May 7 at the Tamkin Auditorium at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, was followed by a panel discussion featuring Turlington Burns; Ted Braun, the writer and director of the 2007 documentary on the genocide in Sudan, “Darfur Now,” and an associate professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts; Dr. Paula Tavrow, director of UCLA’s Bixby Program in Population and Reproductive Health and an adjunct assistant professor of community health sciences at the Fielding School of Public Health; and Dr. Christopher Tarnay, director of urogynecology in the UCLA Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Tarnay recently returned from a Medicine for Humanity mission in Uganda. The discussion was moderated by Julie Cantor, an adjunct professor at the UCLA School of Law.

'No Woman, No Cry' panel discussion at UCLA

“Sharing our stories is one of the best ways to positively… and collectively affect change,” said Turlington Burns, who shared her own personal account of complications during childbirth.

The film, which is part of the Every Mother Counts campaign, an advocacy and mobilization initiative founded by Turlington Burns to increase education and support for the global reduction of maternal mortality, addressed a variety of issues. Giving birth in the United States, where women lacking health insurance have difficulty finding prenatal, labor and post-partum care can be as problematic for pregnant women as giving birth in Africa.

“Unfortunately giving birth in poor countries is very dangerous,” said Tavrow, who has worked with women in Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya and Gambia.

Tavrow spoke not only of the health risks associated with labor but also of some of the other long-term costs for women. “It’s extremely difficult for a girl who has given birth to stay in school,” she said, noting that some first-time mothers may be as young as 12 years old. In most places in sub-Saharan Africa, as soon as a young woman’s pregnancy is noticed she’s no longer allowed to stay in school. After giving birth, she may not return to school because of the social stigma associated with her pregnancy, her long absence from school, school-related expenses and lack of reliable childcare, Tavrow said.

Tarnay spoke about the work that he and his colleagues are doing with Medicine for Humanity to help improve the lives of women in southwestern Uganda who live with obstetric fistula, a condition that results from long, obstructed labor that causes “an abnormal connection between the birth canal to the bladder or the rectum, or both.” This condition often leaves women leaking urine, which, in turn, leaves them socially ostracized. Twice a year, Medicine for Humanity holds “Fistula Camps” and encourages women to come to the university hospital for surgery to repair this condition.

“Part of what we do is try to get them not only repaired, but integrated back into society so they can be functional and working,” Tarnay said.

The May 7 event was sponsored by the UCLA School of Law, the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations and Harlen, a luxury brand that supports the empowerment of women, in association with the UCLA Health and Human Rights Law Project, the USC School of Cinematic Arts, the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, the UCLA Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and the UC Global Health Institute.

To find out about other upcoming talks on maternal mortality and women’s health in Africa, go to the UCLA International Institute.

Gates Foundation grants foster projects that show promise to improve global health.

David Segal, UC Davis

Six researchers affiliated with the University of California have received Grand Challenges Explorations grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They are among 107 grant recipients in the initiative’s eighth round of funding, announced today (May 9).

Grantees include:

David Segal, UC Davis; Transcription Factor Screening for P. falciparum Therapy. Segal 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.

Claire Dillavou, UCLA; More Vaccination, Less Debris: Developing Compostable Vaccine Packaging. Dillavou will develop compostable vaccine packaging to diminish the environmental impact of residual debris from mass vaccination campaigns in developing countries lacking adequate disposal infrastructure.

Frans Walther, UCLA; Aerosol Delivery of Synthetic Lung Surfactant. Walther, of the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, will develop an aerosol formulation of an advanced synthetic lung surfactant to treat lung surfactant deficiency and improve lung function in premature infants who are supported with non-invasive ventilation for prematurity-related breathing problems.

Hideaki Tsutsui, UC Riverside; A Biotic Stress Sensor Printed on Maize Leaves. Tsutsui 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.

Todd Coleman, UC San Diego; Epidermal Electronics for Continuous Pregnancy Monitoring. Coleman, along with John Rogers of the University of Illinois, will develop wireless tattoo-like electronics to continuously monitor vital signs of the pregnant mother and fetus. The devices have the potential to be inexpensively mass produced, which could advance epidemiological studies of preterm birth.

Jay Keasling, Zagaya, Emeryville; Development of a Microorganism to Produce Artemisinin. Keasling, a professor at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley Lab, through Zagaya 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.

Related link:
Grand Challenges Explorations release

Applications for UC GloCal Health Fellowship due May 21.

The deadline is fast approaching for researchers and aspiring investigators interested in studying diseases and conditions in developing countries to submit their applications for a University of California Global Health Institute Fellowship. Applications for the new program, which supports an 11-month, mentored research project at one of the training sites around the world, are due May 21.

Known as the GloCal Health Fellowship, this career development initiative is sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Fogarty International Center as well as a consortium comprised of the five UC medical schools, 25 affiliated international sites, and several other institutes and centers at the NIH.

“This is an incredible opportunity for someone who truly wants to explore and improve health in populations around the world,” said Michael Wilkes, professor of medicine and principal investigator for the GloCal Health Fellowship at UC Davis. “Trainees are matched with top-tier global health faculty and assigned to an international site, where they will have opportunities to gain experiences and skills that will last a lifetime.”

GloCal Health Fellowships are designed for doctoral students as well as medical, dental, pharmacy and veterinary students, postdoctoral fellows and foreign postdoctoral fellows from participating low- and middle-income countries. Junior faculty with current NIH career development awards (K series or similar), whose multidisciplinary interests focus on areas such as social and behavioral science, nutrition, environment, medicine, public health, nursing, veterinary and basic sciences, are also encouraged to apply.

Applicants who are accepted into the program must attend a mandatory, five-day NIH training in Washington, D.C., that is expected to be held in September.

For more information about the training program, and to download an application, visit the GloCal Health Fellowship website.

Ashok Gadgil honored for work in global innovation such as UV Waterworks, Darfur Stove.

Ashok Gadgil, Berkeley Lab

The Lemelson-MIT Program today (May 2) announced Ashok Gadgil as the recipient of the 2012 $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Global Innovation in recognition of his steady pursuit to blend research, invention and humanitarianism for broad social impact. Gadgil is the director of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), and a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

“I am honored and thrilled that the Lemelson-MIT Program has chosen to recognize innovations to help improve lives of poor people in the developing world,” said Gadgil. “We can make a positive difference to the lives of large numbers of people by addressing big problems with low-cost but high-impact innovative solutions.”

Gadgil’s inventions and innovations are improving the livelihood of more than 100 million people in more than 41 countries on four continents, with estimated annual societal economic benefits exceeding $5 billion per year.

He developed the UV Waterworks, a technology for developing countries that uses ultraviolet light to inexpensively disinfect drinking water. UV Waterworks earned Gadgil the Discover Award in 1996 for the most significant environmental invention of the year, as well as the Popular Science award for “Best of What is New–1996.” UV Waterworks is now deployed in villages by WaterHealth International Inc. It provides affordable, safe drinking water to more than 4 million people in India, the Philippines, Nigeria, Liberia and Ghana, with plans for expansion to Bangladesh. Gadgil estimates that with 5 million people served, UV Waterworks would now annually avoid about 1,000 statistical deaths of children from diarrheal diseases in the serviced population.

Current projects by his research team include developing low-cost ways of removing high levels of naturally occurring arsenic from groundwater used for drinking, a serious problem in rural Bangladesh, neighboring parts of India and some other parts of the world.

His research team developed a fuel-efficient stoves for Darfur to help reduce the firewood demand of Darfur displaced persons, most of whom are women at risk of violence as they forage for firewood outside of camp boundaries. To date, more than 20,000 Berkeley-Darfur Stoves have been distributed, helping 125,000 displaced women and their dependents. A survey in 2010 in North Darfur found that the $20 stove annually saves $330 in fuel costs annually for each recipient household. Thus, over their five-year estimated life, the 20,000 stoves will save $33 million for the recipient households. Gadgil is currently working on an iteration of the stove for dissemination in Ethiopia.

The utility-sponsored compact fluorescent lamp leasing programs that he pioneered are being successfully implemented in 38 countries in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Gadgil has received several other awards and honors for his work, including the Pew Fellowship in Conservation and the Environment in 1991 for his work on accelerating energy efficiency in developing countries, the World Technology Award for Energy in 2002, the Tech Laureate Award in 2004, the Heinz Award in 2009, the European Inventor Award in 2011, and the Zayed Future Energy Prize for sustainable energy in early 2012.

He serves on several international and national advisory committees dealing with energy efficiency, invention and innovation, and issues of development and the environment. During the 2004-2005 academic year Gadgil was the MAP/Ming Visiting Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University.

The Lemelson-MIT Program celebrates outstanding innovators and inspires young people to pursue creative lives and careers through invention.