What are NTD’s? Although medically diverse, neglected tropical diseases (NTD) share features that allow them to persist in conditions of poverty, where they cluster and frequently overlap. Approximately 1 billion people – one sixth of the world’s population – suffer from one or more neglected tropical diseases. Conflict situations or natural disasters aggravate conditions that are conducive to the spread of these diseases.
The World Health Organization has defined Neglected Tropical Diseases as diseases that affect a majority of the developing world but have been underfunded in terms of research and product development dollars (http://www.who.int/neglected_diseases/diseases/en/). They include (among others): Buruli ulcer, Chagas disease, Cholera, Dengue, Dracunculensis, Leishmaniasis, Onchocerciasis, Schistosomiasis, and Trachoma. One of the most significant breakthroughs for this important but neglected category of infectious diseases has been the publication of their genomes in public databases. Genomes are the raw materials for the tools used by the iCubed to decipher the interface between pathogen and human immune system, the starting point for the ‘genome to vaccine’ process.
In 2009, the iCubed received an administrative supplement to develop the TRIAD Toolkit set of tools so that they could be applied to NTDs. Funding from the NIH for the NTD@TRIAD program will helped iCubed expand the number of genomes available for use with the iVAX toolkit, and accelerated the tempo of research on epitope-driven vaccines for emerging pathogens and diseases that are relevant to both biodefense and the developing world.
With this supplemental funding, iCubed is developing a comprehensive website that incorporates genome sequences for NTDs with immunoinformatics tools. This web portal will extend and is now being used by the first group of NTD Fellows. For more information on the 2011 NTD Fellows, please click here.
Click here for information on this year’s Neglected Tropical Diseases Workshop.
