THE SPIRIT OF NOTRE DAME
Fall 2007 Edition
For the past four decades, the University of Notre Dame, through the Center for Global Health and Infectious Diseases (CGHID), has been a major player in the fight against illnesses, like malaria, that strike hardest in less-developed regions of the world.
Among its most important contributions: CGHID scientists were responsible for mapping the genetic blueprint of the mosquitoes that transmit malaria and yellow and dengue fevers -- a critical move that is helping scientists develop more potent insecticides and engineer new varieties of mosquitoes incapable of transmitting human disease.
The University's disease-fighting work received an unprecedented boost this fall, when the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced that it had awarded a $20 million grant to fund an expansive, international research project, led by Frank Collins, director of the CGHID and the George and Winifred Clark Chair in Biological Sciences at Notre Dame.
One of the largest external research grants ever awarded to a Notre Dame faculty member, the Gates grant will provide funding for a five-year, multi-site project aimed at evaluating malaria control efforts in Africa and Asia. Despite the disease's devastating footprint, the effectiveness of control methods has never been carefully tested.
"There are three basic interventions against malaria," explains Collins. "Bed nets impregnated with insecticide, spraying houses with insecticides, and targeted drug delivery to pregnant women and infants. All of these techniques are ancient, and none of them has been evaluated very well across the diverse range of environments in which malaria occurs."
Collins and his team, including Notre Dame graduate and undergraduate students, aim to change that by gathering information about patterns of malaria transmission and intervention in a variety of field sites --- in Indonesia, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, and Zambia --- with partners from the Swiss Tropical Institute, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the London Schoool of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and Durham University.
Critical to the project will be the expertise of computer engineers at Notre Dame. "Biology is, on the whole, an increasingly data-driven field," says Greg Madey, a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. "Frank's teams will be out in the field, transmitting enormous amounts of data back to us on campus. Our job will be to build a giant database capable of maintaining the integrity of that data, and then creating the software and tools that will let other scientists access, search, and analyze the information."
"Ultimately, the data we generate," says Collins, "will inform the design of new, and better, malaria control programs. We are working with people and communities of very limited economic means, and so our goal will be to help them make better and more effective use of their public healthcare dollars."