Brainstorming to heal the world

Currently,work is in progress on an electronic nose which can smell and detect tuberculosis; a made to order mouse that can host dengue virus; and new blood-stage malaria vaccine. Besides,there is a new generation testing kit,which could diagnose HIV and Hepatitis C at one go which can be of immense help to blood banks of resource poor countries. And there is an endeavour to develop a dipstick test for malaria.

Even if a single idea comes through,it could transform healthcare in the developing world.

This is a vibrant time for biomedical researchers and a lot of promising work is underway, said Dr Virander Chauhan,Director,ICGEB. The efforts we are making now will show results in ten years time. Science research is expensive and awards like these from the Gates Foundation gives us the encouragement to focus even more and covert these ideas into results.

The Grand Challenge

Not many people will tag a 1,00,000 award from the Bill Gates Foundation a nice surprise. But the scientists here did just that.

When Chauhan,along with his researchers Ranjan Nanda,and KVS Rao had filled up the application form for the Grand Challenge,they did so with minimal expectations.

In two pages,we summed up our research. We were pleasantly surprised when people from the Gates Foundation got back with more questions about the project, said Chauhan. Later,we were informed that our idea had won the award. We were nicely surprised.

Among the 76 award winning ideas that won the Grand Challenge last month,three were from the Delhi-based unit of ICGEB.

The award is largely the seed money to test the premise of their research over the next two years. And it has been granted presupposing that the applicants will generate sufficient evidence to validate their theory and apply for a 1 million grant from the Gates Foundation to develop and deliver the concept.

The ICGEB is dedicated to advanced research and training in molecular biology and biotechnology and focuses in the area of infectious diseases and agriculture. It is currently developing knowledge which will help control infectious diseases like malaria,tuberculosis,influenza,dengue and hepatitis.  

The Electronic Nose

Chauhan won the 1,00,000 for their attempt to create an electronic nose that can smell the patients breath and diagnose tuberculosis bacteria.

In developing countries like ours,diagnosis of TB is a big problem, said Chauhan. Our objective is to come up with a cost-effective method of differentiating between a healthy person and a person infected with TB. Once we can establish the difference,we are hoping to depict this distinction between the chemical molecules in the breaths through an electronic signal.

All this will be done through an easy to use,hand held,non-invasive device which will survive the testing conditions of a developing country factors that make the idea revolutionary in addition to the disease burden.

According to the latest World Health Organisation WHO data released this March,India has over 3.4 million tuberculosis patients about a fifth of global total making it the most TB prevalent country. Nearly 1.9 m new cases are reported every year,while 2.8 per cent of all new cases are diagnosed as multi drug resistant TB. Experts say an estimated 30 per cent of cases go undetected every year.

Blood-stage malaria vaccine

The second award went to Dr Deepak Gaur,Dr Chetan Chitnis and Dr Chauhan for an idea to develop a new blood-stage malaria vaccine,which uses a combination of two proteins from the malaria parasites to stop the parasite from invading a patients red blood cells.

The researches are hoping to develop an antigen that will prevent the malaria parasite from infecting a patient.  

This is a new type of vaccine that has not been tested before. Their goal is to stimulate antibodies that would stop parasite infection of red blood cells by blocking multiple pathways of invasion, explained Dr Gaur.

The idea seems more likely to succeed as even if it does not work,it will point researchers in the right direction.

Whether is succeeds of fails as an idea,it will teach us valuable lessons. If the idea does not work in the current form,we will know what does not work and that will be success too, added Dr Chauhan.

Till now,the malarial parasite has been tackled with only a single blood stage antigen,which is not effective,as the parasite has alternative paths to enter red blood cells. In this research,we are using the combination of three new antigens and hoping to block the malarial parasite out. The research project is being tested in two phases. In the first phase,the seed money of 100,000 will be utilised to test the hypothesis and it will take around 18 months. Then the data generated will be used in the second stage,which involves development and trials.