Reducing parasitic disease in Africa: multinational research

A research team has just secured a grant of €8 million from the European & Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership (EDCTP), a programme supported by the European Union. Part of this will be used to evaluate the immune status of people suffering from a disfiguring type of leishmaniasis, caused by a tiny single-celled parasite. Leishmaniasis primarily affects people in South America, East Africa and Asia, especially those weakened by malnutrition and poverty.

The project is being coordinated by the European Vaccines Initiative and includes researchers from Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan and Uganda, as well as the UK. It is led by Professor Paul Kaye, a global expert in tropical diseases based at the Hull York Medical School at the UK’s University of York. Professor Kaye has developed a new therapeutic vaccine which it is hoped will boost immunity. A prototype is currently being tested in Sudan and will also be evaluated by the research project.

Professor Kaye explained: "To do this successfully, we had to identify better ways of evaluating blood cells in a robust and standardised manner, and also be able to carry this out at different research laboratories across East Africa." It was therefore necessary to find a technologically advanced tool, sensitive enough to support the research aims of identifying rare cell populations, even those with low levels of surface marker expression.