Genomics, Disease Ecology, and Global Health // Genomics, Disease Ecology, and Global Health

World Malaria Day – What would you fight for?

2012-04-24T15:30:00-04:00

Sarah Craig

Wednesday, April 25, 2012, marks World Malaria Day. Notre Dame scientists from the Eck Institute for Global Health and colleagues from around the world are trying to address this disease. Though malaria might not necessarily be “in your back yard,” the answers just might be!

Notre Dame faculty are standing in solidarity with their colleagues of the American Society for Tropical Medicine and on Capitol Hill to showcase the contributions of malaria researchers and innovators from U.S. academic institutions and private companies.

The briefing, "Advancements in U.S. Science and Technology in Malaria: A Showcase of Domestic Research & Development to Save Lives and Keep Americans Safe," will feature researchers from across the country.

Notre Dame faculty and colleagues will have the opportunity to talk with Senate members of the Working Group on Malaria and Neglected Tropical Diseases about global research work and the value it brings to the U.S. Much of the actual work is being done right here on campus.

“It’s an optimistic time for malaria research,” says Notre Dame’s associate professor of Biology, Michael Ferdig, “The new tools and analytical approaches of systems biology are changing what's possible in stopping this disease.”

So please join us in solidarity in support of this unified effort to address future funding of research for malaria around the globe.

Photo credit: James D. Gathany

Eck Institute for Global Health joins AMPATH Consortium

2012-04-23T13:00:00-04:00

The University of Notre Dame’s Eck Institute for Global Health is now a full member of the Academic Model Providing Access to Healthcare (AMPATH) Consortium, led by Indiana University.

The Consortium works in collaboration with Moi University School of Medicine and Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital in Eldoret, Kenya to help build the care, education and research capacity of these institutions with the goal of providing access to health care for all persons throughout western Kenya. The Eck Institute will serve as the central coordinating body for Notre Dame activities within the AMPATH Consortium.

Notre Dame will specifically be involved in this partnership to expand the basic science research capacity at Moi University School of Medicine. Notre Dame has a unique niche in the Consortium in that it is the only member not focused on clinical care and brings a history of expertise in vector control and tropical disease research.

Notre Dame scientists are excited to participate in the partnership knowing they bring a history of experience and global leadership in the fight against tropical diseases including leishmania, malaria, dengue fever and lymphatic filariasis in addition to communicable diseases, tuberculosis and Ebola.

“The University of Notre Dame is committed to the ideals and goals of the existing partnership," said David Severson, the Eck Institute’s director. "We hope to bring our unique faculty and facility resources to the consortium to expand our research opportunities on the African continent and to bring Kenyan researchers to campus for academic exchange and collaboration. We strongly believe that lab to field research partnerships are critical to the institute’s mission.”

The Eck Institute will lead and coordinate research and training activities for Notre Dame that address constraints to health care in western Kenya, and simultaneously contribute to building scientific research capacity. Joint research activities, participation in seminars and academic meetings, student and faculty exchanges, and special short-term courses will be used to advance the mission of the Consortium. Members of the partnership are committed to observance of equity and mutual respect with a desire of common values resulting in maximum benefit for all involved.

The AMPATH Consortium is comprised of Brown University, Duke University, Indiana University, Lehigh Valley Health Systems, Providence Portland Medical Center, Purdue University, University of Utah, University of Toronto and now the University of Notre Dame.

In 1989, Indiana University School of Medicine and Moi University School of Medicine agreed to join together to develop leaders in health care for both the U.S. and Africa. That mission inspired this team to provide invaluable training to future generations of health care providers on both continents.

At the turn of the century, in the face of the deadliest pandemic in human history, Indiana University and Moi University responded by creating one of Africa’s largest, most comprehensive and effective HIV/AIDS control systems. This system is now expanding its scope to include delivery of essential primary care services and control of communicable diseases and non-communicable, chronic illnesses. The AMPATH Consortium in collaboration with Moi University, Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital, and the Kenya Ministry of Health delivers health services in more than 60 hospitals and clinics in rural and urban western Kenya, serving a population of 3 million people.

“As one of the premier universities in our nation with an outstanding commitment to health equity and a distinguished record of research in neglected tropical diseases, the University of Notre Dame complements the strengths of the other institutions in the AMPATH Consortium,” reported Bob Einterz, M.D., director of the AMPATH Consortium and the IU Center for Global Health. “My Kenyan and American colleagues and I welcome the students and faculty members of the University of Notre Dame, and we look forward to working with them to solve many of our world’s most vexing health problems.”

Ecological Genomics of Anopheles gambiae Along a Latitudinal Cline: A Population-Resequencing Approach

2012-04-10T13:00:00-04:00

Changde Cheng, a former fellow of the Eck Institute for Global Health, was chosen for the April 2012 cover issue of Genetics and highlighted by the editors with commentary by Mark Kirkpatrick. Congratulations to Changde Cheng and professor Nora Besansky, as senior author on Ecological Genomics of Anopheles gambiae Along a Latitudinal Cline: A Population Resequencing Approach.

Researchers using novel method to combat malaria drug resistance

2012-04-05T15:00:00-04:00

Researchers from the University of Notre Dame’s Eck Institute for Global Health have developed a “gene chip” to contribute to the identification of malaria drug resistance, an effort that will allow for real-time response in modified treatment strategies for this devastating disease.

The discovery is described in a paper appearing in the latest early online edition of the journal Science. The team of researchers includes Notre Dame’s Michael Ferdig, associate professor of biological sciences; doctoral student Becky Miller; and John Tan, managing director of the Genomics Core Facility, in collaboration with Tim Anderson of Texas Biomedical Research Institute and Francois Nosten, M.D., of the Shoklo Malaria Research Unit in Thailand.

“Malaria has tormented humans forever and continues to thwart comprehensive control efforts,” Ferdig said. “Resistance eventually emerges to every drug tried and vaccines are always ‘on the horizon’ but have not yet materialized.”

Artemisinin, a natural product from a plant used in China for centuries, is the latest candidate drug to combat multidrug-resistant malaria. However, this last line of defense against malaria worldwide is increasingly falling victim to the problem of malaria drug resistance. The loss of the drug would be devastating to malaria control efforts.

“For past drugs, most notably chloroquine, discovery of mutations causing resistance and an understanding of how resistance arose and spread has been ‘retrospective’: too late to do any good, after the drug has already failed,” Ferdig said. “We can use our novel method to see resistance as it is emerging, respond in real time and modify strategies to save a drug, such as protecting it with new formulations and combinations tailored to the specific location of emergence.”

The Notre Dame team, working with the project leaders at Texas Biomedical, used the new genomics and bioinformatics approaches to investigate malaria drug-resistance. Tan of Notre Dame’s Genomics and Bioinformatics Core Facility, working with Miller and other members of the Ferdig team, was instrumental in developing the gene chip to perform detailed genetic analysis of malaria patient samples. This chip can analyze 7,000 informative “SNPs” (single nucleotide polymorphisms) spaced evenly throughout the parasite genome.

“This gives researchers the ability to ‘see’ how the genome is changing under drug selection,” Tan said. “This is especially valuable in Southeast Asia because it is a hot spot for antimalarial drug resistance.”

Resistance has been confirmed in Cambodia and is emerging in Thailand. There has been no concerted use of artemisinin in Laos. These conditions enabled researchers to identify genome regions showing signatures of emerging drug resistance. The Texas group then zeroes in on these regions in more than 700 patients to find candidate genes that could be the cause of resistance.

“We now have markers for emerging resistance and new hypotheses that we will use to track down the resistance mechanism,” Ferdig said. “Together these will indicate new ways to adjust the use of artemisinin (most notably to modify the combinations of partner drugs) and to regulate the pace of resistance.”

Notre Dame’s Eck Institute for Global Health is a world-renowned collaborative research program focused on infectious diseases that impact the poor around the world.

“Notre Dame’s Strategic Research Initiatives, which led to the establishment of the Eck Institute and the Genomics and Bioinformatics Core Facility, has positioned the University to be a world leader in global health,” Bob Bernhard, Notre Dame’s vice president for research, said. “The Ferdig Lab’s partnership with the Texas Biomedical Research Institute is an illustration of the contributions our talented faculty and students can make in collaboration with other top research programs in the world toward solving the most difficult global challenges.”

Contact: Michael Ferdig, 574-631-9973, mferdig@nd.edu

Engineering faculty receive CAREER Awards

2012-04-05T10:00:00-04:00

Two faculty members in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame — Arezoo Ardekani, the Rev. John Cardinal O’Hara, C.S.C., Assistant Professor; and Assistant Professor Philippe Sucosky — have been named recipients of the 2012 National Science Foundation (NSF) Early Career Development (CAREER) Award. The award is the highest honor given by the U.S. government to young faculty in engineering and science.

Since 2011, Ardekani has directed the Complex Fluids and Multiphase Flows Laboratory, which focuses its efforts on the fundamental properties of multiphase flows of Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids relevant to biofluids, and micro/nanofluids for use in biomimetic applications, biomedical devices, alternative energy technologies and environmental remediation.

Her CAREER project, titled “Fluid Dynamics of Bacterial Aggregation and Formation of Biofilm Streamers,” explores the implications of the hydrodynamics of biofilm formation. Biofilms cost the United States billions of dollars annually due to human and animal infections, product contamination and biofouling of membranes. Better understanding of this process could not only save millions of dollars, but could also impact environmental and human health and well-being. In order to understand biofilm formation and growth, the dynamics of bacterial aggregation at ecologically relevant spatiotemporal scales in the presence of flow while interacting with extracellular polymeric substances must be studied. Ardekani’s research group employs state-of-the-art three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics and experimental techniques to study bacterial aggregation and biofilm formation.

In addition to the research efforts, all CAREER projects contain educational components to train the next generation of engineers and scientists. Ardekani’s project includes the development of a graduate-level course on complex fluids and features an interdisciplinary engineering education partnership with the Engineering and Technology Magnet Program for the South Bend Community School Corporation that focuses on restoring an aquatic ecosystem of a local creek by controlling bacteria levels.

Prior to joining the University, Ardekani served as a Shapiro Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is currently a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Chemical Society, American Physical Society, American Society of Mechanical Engineers and Society of Rheology.

She received her doctorate (2009) and master’s (2005) in mechanical and aerospace engineering from the University of California at Irvine and her bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from Sharif University of Technology in Iran (2003).

Sucosky’s expertise is in cardiovascular bioengineering, biofluidic mechanics, mechanobiology and biomedical device design. He directs the Multi-Scale Cardiovascular Bioengineering Laboratory, where his team applies state-of-the-art engineering techniques to solve challenges in the cardiovascular field and improve human health. Health issues studied in the laboratory include the causes of aortic valve calcification and the relationships between blood flow and heart valve disease.

His CAREER project, titled “Contribution to Hemodynamic Shear Stress Abnormalities to Calcific Bicuspid Aortic Valve Disease,” investigates the role played by blood flow in the development of calcific aortic valve disease lesions in a congenital valve defect called the bicuspid aortic valve. According to Sucosky, “Calcific aortic valve disease, where calcium accumulates on the valve leaflets, is the most common valvular heart disease that can lead to heart failure.” Traditionally considered a genetic disease, research suggests that there may be other causes, which, when fully understood, might be prevented. The knowledge gained from this project will bring a new perspective on blood flow abnormalities in the bicuspid valve, and will help to develop predictive models to track disease progression.

The educational plan that accompanies Sucosky’s research focuses on academic curriculum development and outreach activities aimed at increasing student understanding of the interdisciplinary nature of engineering and enhancing student ability to describe medical problems from an engineering perspective. He has also been working with Healthworks! Kids’ Museum, a local institution, to develop interactive exhibits on the human circulatory system to help children develop healthy lifestyles.

Sucosky joined the Notre Dame faculty in 2008. Prior to joining the University he served as a postdoctoral researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology (GIT). He earned his master’s (2000) and doctorate (2005) from GIT.

The CAREER program, which was established by the NSF in 1995, recognizes and supports junior faculty who exhibit a commitment to stimulating research while also providing educational opportunities for students.

Contact: Nina Welding, College of Engineering, nwelding@nd.edu

Eck Institute Director and Member Meet with Carter Center VP

2012-04-03T10:00:00-04:00

EIGH director David Severson joined EIGH member Fr. Tom Streit for dinner with Dr. Donald Hopkins before Hopkins presented "Building Hope and Fighting Disease at the Grassroots: Focus on Disease Eradication and Elimination" on Wednesday, March 28, 2012. Hopkins currently serves as the Vice President of Health Programs for the Carter Center where he has led efforts to eradicate Guinea worm disease, lymphatic filariasis and river blindness. He received his Bachelor of Science from Morehouse College, his Doctor of Medicine from the University of Chicago, and his Master of Public Health from the Harvard School of Public Health. He is well-known for directing the Smallpox Eradication/Measles Control Program in Sierra Leone, West Africa and is the author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated book "Princes and Peasants: Smallpox in History." You can learn more about Dr. Hopkin's extraordinary work at: http://www.cartercenter.org/news/experts/donald_hopkins.html

Shrout named Associate Advisor to Science Translational Medicine journal

2012-03-26T12:00:00-04:00

Joshua Shrout, Assistant Professor, Department of Civil Engineering and Geological Sciences and member of the Eck Institute for Global Health, was recently named a 2012 Associate Advisor to Science Translational Medicine, a sister journal of Science. http://stm.sciencemag.org/

The first of his monthly Editor's Choice articles appears in the March 21, 2012 issue. http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/4/126.toc The article profiles a recent discovery about Salmonella virulence by a Canadian research group at the University of British Columbia.

The Shrout Research Group investigates "sociomicrobiology" and community actions of bacteria that are important to medicine and the environment. http://engineering.nd.edu/profiles/jshrout Social behavior is important to many bacterial processes including how bacteria grow as biofilms that attach to human cells, mineral surfaces, water intake pipes, shower curtains, and many other places.

New paper examines poison resistance in snakes around the world

2012-03-16T09:00:00-04:00

A new study by University of Notre Dame biologist Michael Pfrender and a team of researchers from the University of Nevada, Reno; Utah State University; and the University of Virginia suggests that snakes from different regions of the world have evolved a similar, remarkable resistance to a deadly neurotoxin.

The finding, which appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, greatly increases scientists’ understanding of the genetic basis of adaptation and is a model for understanding the limits to adaptation and the degree to which evolutionary responses are predictable.

Pfrender and colleagues found species of snakes in North, Central and South Americas and Asia that are able to feed on amphibians that secrete a deadly neurotoxic poison, tetrodotoxin or TTX. These snakes have similar mutations in a key sodium-channel gene that makes them highly resistant to TTX. These mutations prevent TTX from blocking the sodium channels in muscle, which would otherwise immobilize the snakes by paralyzing nervous and muscle tissue.

“The key finding is that adaptive evolution is constrained by the functional properties of the genes involved in these evolutionary responses,” Pfrender said. “While there are many possible mutations that can improve fitness, in this case resistance to the neurotoxin TTX, many of these mutations have a cost because they change the normal function of the genes. So, when we look at multiple species that have independently adapted to TTX, we see a very similar, and limited, set of mutations involved. The story is one of repeated evolutionary change that occurs through a limited set of changes at the molecular level.”

The study stems from Pfrender’s interest in understanding how organisms deal with environmental change through adaptive evolution.

“We would like to know what the underlying genetic mechanisms are, and what the limits are to these adaptive responses,” he said. “Ultimately, we would like to develop a predictive framework to gauge when natural populations will be able to evolve rapidly enough to persist in a changing environment and when the environmental change is too fast or too strong, leading to local extinction.”

An understanding of how organisms deal with environmental change is relevant to the major themes of Notre Dame’s Environmental Change Initiative and to the Eck Institute for Global Health, which examines disease resistance coupled with human health.

“Many organisms are exposed to toxic chemicals in their environment, and this system is a model for understanding how they cope with this challenge through evolutionary change,” Pfrender said. “A good example of the application of this knowledge is when we are trying to understand how parasites acquire drug resistance. How do they do it and what are the limits to this response? Can we create more effective drug strategies that capitalize on these functional constraints, making it more difficult for parasites to evolve resistance?”

Pfrender and the Utah State researchers plan to study more snake species and to expand their research to a number of other species, including insects that prey on the toxic eggs of salamanders. They also are examining other genes closely related to the sodium channel genes that are the focus of the PNAS study to expand their understanding of how adaptation occurs.

Contact: Michael Pfrender, 574-631-0591, Michael.Pfrender.1@nd.edu

Team of scientists wins grant to research tuberculosis diagnostics

2012-03-02T14:00:00-05:00

University of Notre Dame Professor Jeff Schorey, associate director of the Eck Institute for Global Health and a member of the Center for Rare and Neglected Diseases, is part of a team of researchers who received one of 10 new Grand Challenges in Global Health (GCGH) Grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to identify biomarkers for the diagnosis of tuberculosis (TB).

TB is one of the world’s deadliest infectious diseases with an estimated 9 million individuals diagnosed and 1.6 million deaths every year. This makes TB the second leading cause of death by an infectious agent, behind only HIV. In 1993, the World Health Organization declared TB a global emergency. This realization has resulted in a significant push to develop new treatment and prevention strategies.

According to Schorey, "In order for existing as well as new antibiotics to be effective, we need to identify the TB patient population. Unfortunately, current strategies for diagnosis of TB are inadequate, particularly in impoverished regions of the world. An estimated 50 percent of TB patients go undiagnosed, in part due to the absence of a sensitive and effective diagnostic test.”

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has recently identified TB diagnostics as a key area for development. "There is an urgent need to break through barriers in biomarker research in order to develop a highly sensitive point-of-care diagnostic to improve identification of active TB cases,” said Chris Wilson, director of Global Health Discovery at the foundation. “We hope these innovative ideas lead to effective and affordable TB diagnostics that can make an impact on one of the world’s deadliest infectious diseases.”

The Schorey laboratory at Notre Dame will work in conjunction with Karen Dobos at Colorado State University and collaborators at the University of California at San Francisco to identify and validate mycobacterial protein signatures present on small membrane vesicles released from M. tuberculosis-infected cells. These vesicles known as exosomes, are ideal for diagnostic development since they can be easily isolated from various body fluids including blood and urine. As pointed out by Schorey, “looking for mycobacterial proteins in serum of a TB patient is even harder then looking for a needle in a haystack; however, by first purifying the exosomes we greatly enrich for the mycobacterial proteins, allowing us to define which proteins correlate with active disease.” Once defined, antibody-based detection systems can be developed to identify active TB patients for antibiotic treatment.

This project falls under the Gates Foundation’s GCGH program to fund Biomarkers of Health and Disease, which was developed to foster scientific and technological innovation to solve key health problems in the developing world. The goal is to identify specific disease biomarkers and to couple this with new technologies for miniaturization and detection. This could enable radically new ways to diagnose disease in individuals, even in remote or impoverished settings. “The recognition by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that diagnostics is a very important component of disease management deserves applause. The implementation of a rapid diagnostic test at the point-of-care for diseases such as TB will have a significant impact on disease prevalence and mortality, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, ” adds Schorey.

Contact: Sarah Craig, craig.20@nd.edu

Do you have your red on?

2012-02-03T07:00:00-05:00

It is heart month and a member of the The Eck Institute for Global Health is looking at the heart from the inside out. EIGH PhD Fellow Ling Sun is looking at the mechanobiological elucidation of heart valve disease. "I intend to examine the effects of normal and abnormal blood fluid forces on the biology of aortic valve leaflets in order to determine the molecules potentially involved in the transduction of abnormal hemodynamic forces into a pathological response."

So while the rest of us are eating chocolate out of a cardboard heart and donning our red dresses in honor of heart month, Ling is working away under Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering professor Philippe Sucosky to help address that chocolate we once consumed.

Join members of the EIGH in supporting the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) Heart Truth campaign through the month of February. Wear your red from the Red Dress Collection!

Hybrid silkworms spin stronger spider silk

2012-01-06T15:00:00-05:00

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Research was published this week showing that silk produced by transgenically-engineered silkworms in the laboratory of Malcolm Fraser Jr., professor of biological sciences at University of Notre Dame, exhibits the highly sought-after strength and elasticity of spider silk. This stronger silk could possibly be used to make sutures, artificial limbs and parachutes.

The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and highlighted for their breakthrough in the long search for silk with such mechanical properties. The manuscript was published after an in-depth peer review process, and was deemed by the publishers as a newsworthy article of the issue in which it appears, further indicating its relative importance to science and technology.

“It’s something nobody has done before,” Fraser says. The project, which used Fraser’s piggyBac vectors to create transgenic silkworms with both silkworm and spider silk proteins, was a collaboration of his laboratory with Donald Jarvis and Randolph Lewis at the University of Wyoming. Jarvis’ lab made the transgene plasmids, while Fraser’s lab made the transgenic silkworms and Lewis’ lab analyzed the fiber from the silkworms. Results showed that the fibers were tougher than typical silkworm silk and as tough as dragline silk fibers produced by spiders, demonstrating that silkworms can be engineered to produce such improved fibers.

Commercial production of spider silk from spiders is impractical because spiders are too cannibalistic and territorial for farming. Researchers have experimented with producing the stronger material in other organisms, including bacteria, insects, mammals and plants, but those proteins require mechanical spinning – a task the silkworms perform naturally. The stronger fiber could find application in sutures, where some natural silkworm silk is used, as well as wound dressings, artificial ligaments, tendons, tissue scaffolds, microcapsules, cosmetics and textiles.

This work is the culmination of a research effort begun more than 10 years ago with an internal award from Notre Dame to Fraser to develop silkworm transgenics capabilities; a two-year NIH R21 grant awarded to Jarvis, Lewis and Fraser; and several years of supplemental funding from Kraig BioCraft Laboratories. The success of this research would have been impossible without the ability to carry out silkworm transgenesis, mastered by Bong-hee Sohn and Young-soo Kim in the Fraser lab at Notre Dame.

Kraig Biocraft Laboratories Inc., with Fraser, Lewis and Jarvis on its scientific board, is currently evaluating several business opportunities for this first generation fiber for both textile and non-textile use. The researchers ultimately expect to improve on the first-generation product to make even stronger fibers.

Fraser is the Rev. Julius A. Nieuwland, C.S.C., Professor of Biological Sciences at Notre Dame and is a member of the Eck Institute for Global Health. Fraser holds seven patents and is widely known for his work in molecular virology and transgenic engineering.

Contact: Malcolm Fraser, 574-631-6209, mfraser@nd.edu

HHS Global Health Strategy

2012-01-06T15:00:00-05:00

The Department released its first Global Health Strategy. The Strategy will guide our efforts and commitment to work with global partners towards building a healthier and safer planet for all.

Read the HHS Global Health Strategy.

Read the Secretary’s remarks.

Webcast - Opening session of the 2011 Global Health Conference

2011-12-20T11:00:00-05:00

A webcase of the opening session of the 2011 Global Health Conference held in montreal, Canada, November 13-15 is available.

We highly recommend the talk by Romeo Dallaire - it is absolutely riveting.

View here

Research to improve sanitation in Africa gets $1 million boost

2011-12-20T10:00:00-05:00

Molly Lipscomb, assistant professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame, and Laura Schechter and Jean-François Houde, economists at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, hope to increase the accessibility of sanitation technology in poor neighborhoods, making sanitation services more environmentally friendly and improving the health of neighborhood residents in Dakar, Senegal.

Their two-year research project is supported by a more than $1 million grant to Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Lipscomb, an environmental and development economist who is a faculty fellow at Notre Dame’s Kellogg Institute for International Studies, credits a $15,000 seed grant from the Institute’s Ford Family Program in Human Development Studies and Solidarity with helping to lay the groundwork for the new, larger study.

“The pilot study funded in 2009 by the Ford Program helped us understand many of the issues in the field,” she says. “We were looking at the impact of social pressure on people’s willingness to pay for sanitation services.”

In both projects, the economic problem is similar: how to incentivize the proper disposal of waste, either through social effects or through reducing the costs of disposal services. The pilot project analyzed willingness to pay for the disposal of gray water while the new project investigates the disposal of sludge from latrines.

“Sanitation is one of the biggest health concerns in high-density poor communities in developing countries,” says Lipscomb in describing the new, scaled-up project. Because proper disposal technology and services cost householders money, many dump latrine waste in the streets or pay manual laborers to remove the sludge, which they usually dump illegally near people’s homes.

With the new funding, the researchers are conducting three randomized controlled trials, which will cover 4,000 households in 400 poor neighborhoods of Dakar.

One trial will pinpoint ways to increase household investment in sanitation through social effects such as altruism, social pressure, or learning from neighbors. The other two will explore how to reduce the market power of mechanized sludge removal firms, as anti-competitive practices keep prices high.

To carry out the study, the collaborators are partnering with CREPA, a West African NGO that specializes in research on sanitation, and working closely with ONAS, the National Office for Sanitation of Senegal.

Project results are expected to inform marketing and operational work in sanitation in Dakar, as well as in other parts of Senegal and the developing world.

The Ford Program promotes the interdisciplinary study of international human development at Notre Dame.

Innovations for Poverty Action is a nonprofit dedicated to discovering what works to help the world’s poor. The organization designs and evaluates programs in real contexts with real people, and provides hands-on assistance to bring successful programs to scale.

Contact: Molly Lipscomb, 574-631-1369, mlipscom@nd.edu

Wiest selected to serve as associate editor of Journal of Organic Chemistry

2011-12-20T10:00:00-05:00

Olaf Wiest, professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, is serving as an associate editor of the American Chemical Society”s Journal of Organic Chemistry, the leading journal in the field with more than 91,000 citations last year. Beginning in October 2011, Wiest, who came to Notre Dame 16 years ago, will be one of 11 associate editors around the world and responsible for articles in mechanistic and computational chemistry.

His duties involve work on 200 to 250 manuscripts a year that editor-in-chief will assign. He will send them to at least three reviewers based on their expertise in the paper topic and their availability. Peer review is a significant part of the service to the scientific community for any faculty member, including Wiest, who typically reviews one or two papers each week for a variety of journals. He has published some 20 articles in the journal since 1996, among his total of 125 published articles.

The decisions of associate editor are critical for the quality and reputation of the journal. “You have to closely look at every paper and know the field well enough where to send it,” Wiest says. “This is really something where experience counts — knowing the field, knowing the reviewers, who is a prompt and thorough reviewer. Based on the reviewers’ reports, the associate editors decide what gets published in the journal and what doesn’t.”

Compassion in Global Health - Video

2011-12-12T12:00:00-05:00

This 30 minute video is a collaborative effort highlighting the role of compassion in global health. Featuring global health leaders and educators from around the world to dialogue about the value of seeing the faces of people helped through public health. The video features former President Jimmy Carter, former US Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher, global health pioneer and founder of The Task Force, Dr. William Foege, and Task Force President and CEO Dr. Mark Rosenberg.

Watch video here

New documentary explores “Compassion in Global Health”

2011-12-12T08:00:00-05:00

University of Notre Dame faculty and students joined colleagues at an inaugural symposium on Compassion in Global Health during the annual meeting of American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTHM) this week in Philadelphia. The symposium featured a distinguished panel of experienced global health professionals, some of whom celebrated Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., Notre Dame president emeritus; and the late UNICEF President Jim Grant as among visionaries who have recognized the importance of linking compassion with global health and development.

The symposium featured the premiere of “Compassion in Global Health,” a new documentary by award-winning British filmmaker Richard Stanley. Highlighting the experiences of notable participants as shared in a unique meeting conducted last year at the Carter Center in Atlanta, the film includes perspectives from President Jimmy Carter, global health champion Paul Farmer, small
pox eradication hero Bill Forge, Earth Institute founder Jeffrey Sachs, former U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher, and Notre Dame theology professor Lawrence Sullivan, as well as other physicians, experts and patients from around the globe.

The symposium and a newly developed curriculum with an accompanying DVD were the brain child of David Addiss, now with the Task Force for Global Health. Addiss, a longtime collaborator in Notre Dame’s public health research work with the Haitian government, noted that “Although compassion is a core value and a fundamental source of inspiration and motivation for those
working in the field, this is rarely acknowledged or discussed in global health organizations, training programs, or conferences.

“Consequently,” Addiss continued in his review of the film, “the potential of compassion in global health is limited.” The training materials address the role and impact of compassion in global health, and are destined for use in many settings around the globe, from universities to village clinics: “The film and study guide are offered in the belief that re-discovery of compassion can reinvigorate global health, provide a sense of meaning and connection for those who work in this field, and empower them to connect more deeply, at an intellectual and emotional level, with those they seek to serve,” Addiss said.

The film was developed by the Fetzer Institute of Kalamazoo, currently led by Sullivan, who is on leave from Notre Dame.

Along with colleagues at the Atlanta-based Task Force and the Templeton Foundation, a wide range of Notre Dame units are supporting the effort: Office of the President, Office of the Vice-President for Research, Center for Rare and Neglected Diseases, Eck Institute for Global Health, Hillebrand Center for Compassionate Care, Kellogg Institute for International Studies, Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, and the Haiti Program.

Contact: Sarah Craig, 574-631-3273, scraig@nd.edu

Professor Malcolm Fraser awarded a five year grant from the National Institutes of Health

2011-12-09T12:00:00-05:00

Professor Malcom Fraser has been awarded a five year $2,989,065 grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop novel approaches to the control of several of the world’s most pervasive viral diseases: Yellow Fever, Dengue and Chikungunya. Fraser, Rev. Julius A. Nieuwland, CSC Professor of Biological Sciences and Fellow of the Eck Institute for Global Health, is a world class virologist known for his innovative approaches. In this case, his research focuses on the development of mosquitoes that are genetically resistant to infection with these human pathogens, thus interrupting the transmission of disease pathogens from mosquito to human.

New paper calls for strong steps to tackle antibiotic resistance

2011-12-09T10:00:00-05:00

Shahriar Mobashery, a University of Notre Dame researcher, is one of the co-authors of a new paper by a group of the world’s leading scientists in academia and industry that calls for strong steps to be taken to control the global crisis of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. The group issued a priority list of steps that need to be taken on a global scale to resolve the crisis.

The paper is an outgrowth of a meeting the group held at the Banbury Conference Centre in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., to discuss the crisis and it appears in the journal Nature Reviews Microbiology.

The group notes that in Europe in 2007, the number of infections by multidrug-resistant bacteria was 400,000 and there were 25,000 attributable deaths.

In the United States alone, antibiotic-resistant infections are responsible for $20 billion per year in excess health care costs, $35 billion per year in societal costs and 8 million additional hospital stays per year.
The problem of resistance is compounded by the fact that we live in a global economy, resulting in a worldwide spread of antibiotic-resistant genes.

The Banbury group recommends that research priorities be established to control resistance and points out that additional basic information about resistance is required to address the crisis.

“Increasing lines of evidence identify the principal reservoirs of resistance genes to be bacteria that live in and on humans and animals, as well as those found in the environment (in soil, water and so on),” the paper notes. “However, there is insufficient information about the conditions and factors that lead to the mobilization, selection and movement of these bacteria into and between animal and human populations.”

The report also calls for increased international funding to enable scientists to track new antibiotic-resistance threats worldwide, in a manner similar to how the World Health Organization and other agencies track influenza outbreaks.

The paper points out that antibiotic resistance is life-threatening in the same sense as cancer, both in the number of cases and the likely outcome. It therefore calls for a public education campaign about bacteria and antibiotic resistance similar to those that have been mounted for cancer awareness.

The study also notes that in some parts of the world, population density, the uncontrolled use of antibiotics, a lack of both a clean water supply and proper treatment for sewage and industrial effluent create the conditions that disseminate and select resistant bacteria.

“Local governments must be encouraged and supported to invest in better sanitation infrastructure and tighter prescription regulations to control the rapid evolution of resistance,” the scientists said. “This is a worldwide, multinational problem and must be treated as such.”

The group also notes that it is essential to develop a continuous supply of new antibiotics that are not affected by known or existing mechanisms of resistance. The economics of pharmaceutical drug development offer little incentive for companies to develop new antibiotics, since the drugs are used on an episodic, rather than continual, basis. New public-private partnerships must develop to overcome the economics barriers facing the development o new antibiotics.

The Banbury participants also call for better control of antibiotic use, repurposing of old antibiotics to battle resistance and new alternatives to antibiotics.

The group’s paper concludes: “The cost of the undertaking what we propose will be infinitesimally small in comparison to the economic and human cost of doing nothing.”

Contact: Shahriar Mobashery, 574-631-2933, mobashery@nd.edu

Notre Dame cancer researcher named V Scholar

2011-10-27T10:00:00-04:00

Zachary Schafer, the Coleman Assistant Professor of Cancer Biology in the Department of Biological Sciences and a member of the Harper Cancer Research Institute at the University of Notre Dame, has been named a 2011 V Scholar by one of the nation’s leading cancer research fundraising organizations, the V Foundation for Cancer Research. Seventeen physician/scientists will share the $3.4 million in funding given through the V Scholar program to bring science closer to finding a cure for cancer.

Through a very competitive process, Schafer was chosen from nominees at National Cancer Institute (NCI)-designated cancer centers and prominent universities involved in critical cancer research. He was nominated for this award by the Harper Cancer Research Institute and will use this award to study the regulation of tumor cell survival by carcinoma-associated fibroblasts.

As a V Scholar, Schafer has been awarded a two-year, $200,000 grant, and will have the freedom to decide how to best use the funds to further his research.

“Each year, the V Scholars are selected from a group of young cancer scientists that includes the most outstanding candidate from each of the National Cancer Institute designated cancer centers,” said Robert C. Bast Jr., vice president for translational research at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board. “This year the V Scholars are even more exceptional than in the past.”

Schafer’s laboratory studies how cancer cells can survive outside their natural environments and how changes in cellular metabolism can promote survival or induce cell death. He focuses on how cancer cells disable anoikis, a cell death program that serves as a barrier to metastasis by killing cells that have left their normal home.

His preliminary work has demonstrated that carcinoma-associated fibroblasts, noncancerous cells present in the tumor microenvironment, are actively involved in blocking anoikis. Schafer’s laboratory will seek to identify and characterize the precise mechanisms that are involved in the prevention of anoikis by carcinoma-associated fibroblasts. He seeks to understand the basic biology underlying this process, so that novel therapeutics can be designed to target these mechanisms, inhibiting cancer metastasis.

“I am humbled and honored to be recognized and supported by an organization I have so much respect for,” Schafer said. “I vividly remember watching Jim Valvano give the speech announcing the creation of the V Foundation shortly before he died, and I remain inspired by his call to action for cancer research. I am tremendously grateful to the Department of Biological Sciences for the opportunity to build my research program amongst a multitude of passionate and talented colleagues and for the outstanding mentorship I have received from senior faculty that made this award possible.”

The V Foundation, a charitable organization dedicated to saving lives by helping to find a cure for cancer, was founded in 1993 by ESPN and Jim Valvano, a former NCAA championship winning basketball coach and cancer patient.

As a cancer patient, Valvano recognized the need to invest in young physician/scientists to help establish their careers, as someone had invested in him early in his career. The Foundation developed the V Scholar program to help early-career cancer investigators develop into promising future research talents, so that the scientific process from laboratory research to the patient bedside could be shortened.

Schafer earned his undergraduate degree in biology at Notre Dame in 2001 and his doctorate at Duke University in 2006. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School until he joined the Notre Dame faculty in 2009.

Contact: Zachary Schafer, 574-631-0875, zschafe1@nd.edu