To tackle the human health challenges that face the world today, the FNIH develops collaborations with top experts from government, industry, academia and the not-for-profit sector and provides a neutral environment where we can work productively toward a common goal.
Two billion people worldwide are infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) resulting in 10 million cases of clinical disease and 1.5 million deaths each year. The hurdles for developing a highly protective and durable vaccine against Mtb require addressing four central tenets of T cell immunology – magnitude, quality, breadth, and location of the response. These specific elements of the problem will be addressed by focusing on how altering the route of vaccination using a whole attenuated organism vaccine substantially increases immune responses and protection in a rigorous non-human primate model of Mtb infection.
Gene drive is a mechanism that can promote the preferential inheritance of a beneficial genetic trait, thereby increasing its prevalence in a population. A variety of gene drive mechanisms occur in nature that can cause specific genetic elements to spread throughout populations in varying degrees. Researchers have long sought to harness these naturally occurring gene drive mechanisms to prevent the transmission of mosquito or other insect-borne diseases that pose some of society's most intractable public health problems.
The project provides the FNIH management and advisory services for research programs seeking to develop new cost-effective and sustainable biologic strategies for controlling mosquito-borne infections like malaria and dengue fever.
A collaborative program that provides standardized and research level assays for clinical and pre-clinical HIV vaccine trials.
SHORTEN-TB will build on lessons learned from the HIT-TB program to identify leads that have the greatest potential to comprise drug regimens that will significantly reduce the duration of chemotherapy for tuberculosis.
PredictTB is a five-year clinical trial project that aims to shorten the treatment times of tuberculosis (TB) in drug-sensitive patients through individualized therapy.
Informing the development of the Precision Medicine Initiative.
In India, the sand fly vector Phlebotomus argentipes is responsible for the transmission of the protozoan parasite Leishmania donovani, which causes a disease called visceral leishmaniasis (VL), from one human to another.
The study was implemented using shared and harmonized protocols across the eight sites to gather an enormous amount of data (physical, cognitive assessments, diet, illness and enteric infection, socio-economic status, etc.) to enable identification and characterization of factors associated with negative impacts on a child’s growth, development and vaccine response early in life.