Tag Archives: Grand Challenges Explorations

Tanzania’s Dr Hulda Shaidi Swai

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I’ve developed a pet peeve over the years about Africa being discussed as if it were a country and not a continent made up of diverse countries and peoples. So, I was particularly delighted to find Robert Mpinga’s Jan. 26, 2012 article discussing Dr. Hulda Shaidi Swai’s nanomedicine work and his opinion of the differing approaches to research and development (R&D) followed in Tanzania and South Africa. From Mpinga’s Jan. 26, 2012 article for allAfrica,

One of our [Tanzania’s] own daughters, Dr Hulda Shaidi Swai, is currently making news across the world in her pioneering work that seeks to employ “nanotechnology” to treat TB and what she calls ‘other diseases of poverty’ more efficiently – and in less the time it takes now – yet still hopes to do so in safer ways.

There is no prize for guessing why you haven’t heard about her: she is doing all this from the comfort of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), a South African centre of excellence based in Pretoria. In many ways, Dr Swai embodies our country’s collective failure to accommodate people who think and act outside the box of our comfort zones.

Not surprisingly, Hulda could well be poised to make global waves even as we at home remain locked in mundane debate over the safety and perceived dangers of farming GM (genetically modified) crops – a field of science which now pales into yesteryear in the face of new advances of ‘nano’ frontiers.

Dr. Swai has received some very impressive support for her work,

The moral of Dr Swai’s story is not that she has set out on mission impossible; in fact, she has already marshaled a team of 19 people to her stable — the Nanomedicine Platform for Infectious Diseases of Poverty – which includes seven post-doctorate scientists, three PhD and four Masters of Science (MSc) students, two technicians and a project manager.

She also has the backing of the top leadership in South Africa, including former president Thabo Mbeki and the country’s minister responsible for science and technology. The commitment and imagination of all these men and women have been fired from a dream of this single Tanzanian woman scientist, but their combined resolve to act as a team has since won them global support: US $100,000 in project support from the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation – through its ‘Grand Challenges Exploration’ programme — the only one of two such awards in Africa to date, and an EU approval for its provisional application for intellectual property (IP) protection of its pioneering work on a novel anti-TB drug therapy delivery system.

Dr. Swai is critical of research being done in rich countries,

“The scientists in rich countries are only interested in diseases that affect them … not malaria.”

You’ll find more details about Swai’s work and more about her opinions  in Mpinga’s article. The ‘Grand Challenges Explorations’ programme was also mentioned in my Dec. 22, 2011 posting when a series of major grants  (some to researchers in Canada) was announced.

Micro needle patches project gets Grand Challenges Explorations grant

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The project being funded with a Grand Challenges Explorations grant (from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) reminds me a lot of the nanopatch that Mark Kendall and his team have been developing in Australia (a project last mentioned in my Aug. 3, 2011 posting). This new initiative comes from the Georgia Institute of Technology and is aimed at the eradication of polio. From the Nov. 7, 2011 news item on Nanowerk,

The Georgia Institute of Technology will receive funding through Grand Challenges Explorations, an initiative created by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that enables researchers worldwide to test unorthodox ideas that address persistent health and development challenges. Mark Prausnitz, Regents’ professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, will pursue an innovative global health research project focused on using microneedle patches for the low-cost administration of polio vaccine through the skin in collaboration with researchers Steve Oberste and Mark Pallansch of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

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The goal of the Georgia Tech/CDC project is to demonstrate the scientific and economic feasibility for using microneedle patches in vaccination programs aimed at eradicating the polio virus. Current vaccination programs use an oral polio vaccine that contains a modified live virus. This vaccine is inexpensive and can be administered in door-to-door immunization campaigns, but in rare cases the vaccine can cause polio. There is an alternative injected vaccine that uses killed virus, which carries no risk of polio transmission, but is considerably more expensive than the oral vaccine, requires refrigeration for storage and must be administered by trained personnel. To eradicate polio from the world, health officials will have to discontinue use of the oral vaccine with its live virus, replacing it with the more expensive and logistically-complicated injected vaccine.

Prausnitz and his CDC collaborators believe the use of microneedle patches could reduce the cost and simplify administration of the injected vaccine.

Iwonder if this team working at the microscale rather than the nanoscale, as Kendall’s team does, is finding some of the same benefits, from my August 3, 2011 posting,

Early stage testing in animals so far has shown a Nanopatch-delivered flu vaccine is effective with only 1/150th of the dose compared to a syringe and the adjuvants currently required to boost the immunogenicity of vaccines may not be needed. [emphases mine]

I find the notion that only 1/150th of a standard syringe dosage can be effective quite extraordinary. I wonder if this will hold true in human clinical trials.

If they get similar efficiencies at the microscale as they do at the nanoscale, the expense associated with vaccines using killed viruses should plummet dramatically. I do have one thought, do we have to eradicate the polio virus in a ‘search and destroy mission’? Couldn’t we learn to live with them peacefully while discouraging their noxious effects on our own biology?