devinitorg/iati-policy-markers huggingface dataset:
A Network for Studying Psychological Resilience in Low and Middle-Income Countries (NESP) Vulnerability to or resilience to the commonest mental health disorders (depression, anxiety, drug and alcohol misuse) is related to the combination of genetic susceptibility, early life factors and an individual's current environment. Studies, over 95% of which have been confined to high income countries (HICs), have confirmed the importance of genes, development and adult environment. However, very little is known of these factors in low and middle-income countries (LMICs), where the burden of such common mental health disorders is even more substantial than in HICs.  Here we propose a powerful network of global leaders to analyse the key factors in three contrasting LMIC settings in three regions of the world, Nepal, Malawi and Costa Rica. This will enable us systematically to determine the processes leading to vulnerability or resilience to common disorders of mental health and exploit this knowledge, enabled by globally-leading data sciences and within-country expertise, to develop specific approaches to reinforce resilience and support prevention, diagnosis and treatment.  Our approach is highly multidisciplinary, combining genetic, clinical and social sciences expertise to provide a comprehensive view of an individual's genetics, development and environment. We will combine this expertise with world-leading informatics capacity to create a network for the study of psychological resilience across diverse environments and economies. The Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) supports cutting-edge research to address challenges faced by developing countries. The fund addresses the UN sustainable development goals. It aims to maximise the impact of research and innovation to improve lives and opportunity in the developing world.
Developing low-cost cognitive tools for dementia assessment in low-to-middle income countries (LMICs) In 2013, there were 44.4 million people with dementia worldwide. By 2030, this number will likely increase to 75.6 million, and by 2050 to 135.5 million. A new case of dementia is diagnosed somewhere in the world every 4 seconds. Not surprisingly, the costs of this public health challenge are substantial (US$604 billion in 2010, 1% of total global GDP).   Notably, 58% of individuals experiencing dementia are thought to live in low-to-middle-income countries (LMICs), underlining the high impact of dementia in those regions, where - relative to high income countries (HICs) - understanding of dementia is low, health and social care less well developed, and social exclusion high. By 2050, it is estimated that 71% of individuals with dementia worldwide will be living in LMICs; the social and financial burden of dementia, therefore, is increasingly being felt in countries with limited health infrastructure and support for affected individuals. Compounding this problem, less than 10% of individuals in LMICs receive a dementia diagnosis, or tailored medical guidance to help them and their families understand how the particular form of dementia they are experiencing may impact on their daily living.  These issues additionally limit involvement of LMICs in global clinical trials where new drug therapies may be subsidized, and supportive care provided.  Rapid action is needed if these problems are to be addressed. In particular, there is an urgent need for effective, low-cost cognitive assessment approaches which can aid diagnosis and be used in geographically- and culturally-diverse areas of the world.  When complemented by provision of information about different forms of dementia, this can help families and healthcare professionals implement appropriate and tailored care for patients, and identify individuals who can be included in global clinical trials.  To address this problem, the Foundation Award focuses on the development of new digital cognitive testing platforms, able to be provided in LMICs via tablets and smartphones.  We will work with collaborators from other HIC and LMICs across the globe also interested in advancing cognitive assessment in LMICs, ensuring a bidirectional partnership with the needs of LMICs foremost. The development and pilot work to be undertaken as part of this project will underpin further grant applications focused on development of a common cognitive assessment platform able to be applied to enhance assessment and interventional approaches focused on reducing the significant worldwide burden of dementia. The Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) supports cutting-edge research to address challenges faced by developing countries. The fund addresses the UN sustainable development goals. It aims to maximise the impact of research and innovation to improve lives and opportunity in the developing world.
Development and pilot testing of an m-health intervention to reduce COVID-19 associated psychosocial distress among Nigerian healthcare workers MRC GECO COVID award to develop and pilot test an m-health intervention to reduce COVID-19 associated psychosocial distress among Nigerian healthcare workers COVID-19 The Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) supports cutting-edge research to address challenges faced by developing countries. The fund addresses the UN sustainable development goals. It aims to maximise the impact of research and innovation to improve lives and opportunity in the developing world.
Serological tools for COVID-19 control and vaccine roll-out in Southeast Asia MRC GECO COVID award to evaluate new serological targets and establish assays that can be implemented to assist a surveillance system to monitor the progress of vaccination and SARS-CoV-2 elimination in the Thailand and Philippines community COVID-19 The Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) supports cutting-edge research to address challenges faced by developing countries. The fund addresses the UN sustainable development goals. It aims to maximise the impact of research and innovation to improve lives and opportunity in the developing world.
Strategies to reduce vertical transmission of multi-drug resistant pathogens to neonates (NeoVT-AMR) Major progress has been made over the last two decades in reducing deaths in young children from the world's poorest countries, however death rates in newborn babies remain high. Bacterial infection is one of the commonest causes of illness and death in newborn babies across the world but is particularly problematic in low income settings. Resistance to commonly used antibiotics is increasingly seen in infections affecting young babies, and in some countries this is resulting in babies developing serious infections which cannot be treated with locally available antibiotics. Cheap, effective, readily available strategies to reduce neonatal infections are urgently required. Babies are often infected by bacteria that colonise their skin shortly after they are born. One method of reducing infection in young babies could therefore be to apply antiseptics to the birth canal of women in labour and to the skin of newborn babies to reduce the number of bacteria found on babies' skin. Finding out whether antiseptic use could reduce the number of babies developing infections will need a large, complex trial over multiple sites, but currently the best antiseptic regime to use for such a trial is not known. Our proposed study sets out to provide this information.  We plan to compare two different antiseptics which are used routinely in hospitals in the care of babies and women in labour: chlorhexidine (CHG) and octenidine (OCT). We will look at how well these two antiseptics reduce the amount of bacterial present when they are applied to the birth canal of a mother and to the skin of a baby.  We will also compare different frequencies of applying the antiseptics to determine which schedule works best. The study will enroll women and babies presenting to a government hospital in Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world, and will allocate them to receive one of the antiseptic regimes. The number of bacteria present in the birth canal (women) and skin (babies) after antiseptic is applied will be tested using skin swabs.  This study will carefully collect data on whether antiseptic causes skin irritation or any other problems, and will collect data from women about how acceptable it is to have antiseptic applied whilst they are in labour. The information we collect as part of this study will help decide how we design a future large study to see if antiseptics can reduce the number of serious infections occurring in young babies. The Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) supports cutting-edge research to address challenges faced by developing countries. The fund addresses the UN sustainable development goals. It aims to maximise the impact of research and innovation to improve lives and opportunity in the developing world.
Optimising the public health benefits of sex work regulation in Senegal: A formative study MRC PHIND award Optimising the public health benefits of sex work regulation in Senegal: A formative study The Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) supports cutting-edge research to address challenges faced by developing countries. The fund addresses the UN sustainable development goals. It aims to maximise the impact of research and innovation to improve lives and opportunity in the developing world.
Using single-cell RNAseq to investigate human malaria parasite transmission dynamics Malaria is caused by a parasite that is transmitted exclusively by mosquitoes. The greatest malaria reduction and eradication success stories have been achieved by interrupting transmission. Historically, this has been through mosquito control. Targeting the small population of specialised parasites residing in the human host that are transmitted through mosquitoes would provide a similarly powerful malaria control method but we know too little about this population. Until now, the genes expressed by parasites have been analyzed by combining millions of parasites together. This approach confounds differences between individual parasites that could underlie success in getting into another host or in resisting the drugs we use to kill the parasites. We have recently developed a method to analyse single parasites one at a time. This technological leap has allowed us to understand parasites in the laboratory with more precision than ever before and importantly to understand how one parasite may differ from another during the whole life of the parasite both in the host and in the mosquito. Although the laboratory setting and lab strains of parasites are powerful tools for understanding parasite biology, in the lab we cannot understand the full diversity of parasites that exist in the wild causing devastating consequences for infected individuals. In this project we propose to characterise wild parasites at an individual level in partnership with Malian scientists. Our exploration will allow us to characterise the three main species of malaria parasite in sub-saharan Africa on a single parasite level for the first time. We will integrate the data into an interactive website called the Malaria Cell Atlas. This will become a key resource for the research community. We will then explore the changes from one patient to the other of the deadliest malaria species in both patients that are suffering from malaria symptoms and also from infected carriers who are not suffering from malaria, both of which contribute to the overall reservoir of parasites. Altogether, we will look at more than 300,000 individual parasites and get a very deep understanding of how individual parasites are both similar and different from each other.  Understanding this infectious reservoir is pivotal to identifying how parasites efficiently get from one person to the next. Altogether our findings using cutting-edge tools to explore wild parasites will be key to understanding malaria and how to best control it. The Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) supports cutting-edge research to address challenges faced by developing countries. The fund addresses the UN sustainable development goals. It aims to maximise the impact of research and innovation to improve lives and opportunity in the developing world.
Understanding phenotype and mechanisms of spontaneous preterm birth in sub-Saharan Africa (PRECISE-SPTB) Preterm birth, birth before 37 weeks of pregnancy, is a major cause of infant death and illness in sub-Saharan Africa.   Over 80% of preterm births globally have been estimated to occur in sub-Saharan African (sSA) and Asian countries, the majority being due to women going into preterm labour spontaneously or their membranes (waters) rupture early (classified together as spontaneous preterm birth, SPTB).   Despite knowledge of the global impact of SPTB, most of the research into this often devastating pregnancy outcome has focussed on pregnant women in high income countries such as the UK and USA. Much less in known about SPTB in women from low income countries.  However, the underlying biological causes of SPTB are complex and heavily influenced by environment, nutrition, infection and other risk factors that pregnant women are exposed to. Region specific research is essential if we are to improve maternal and newborn healthcare in countries where the burden of preterm birth is highest.    Addressing this need, we plan to study to clinical and social risk factors (from 5000 women recruited to the PRECISE Network pregnancy cohort, https://precisenetwork.org/) combined with biological markers of SPTB in the female reproductive tract, blood and placental tissue in women from Kenya, The Gambia and Mozambique.  We will integrate these data to enhance our biological understanding of SPTB as well as identifying novel biomarkers relevant to sub-Saharan African populations to predict risk of SPTB.  We will also create sustainable teams of SPTB researchers by training five new African scientists and supporting their supervisor as research leaders. We will, with colleagues in The Gambia, establish a bioinformatics training programme and a laboratory science network for our researchers in Sub Saharan Africa and the UK.     We anticipate that this work will impact future strategies for clinical risk management, prevention and treatment that specifically addresses the needs of women in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as having potential relevance to SPTB globally. The Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) supports cutting-edge research to address challenges faced by developing countries. The fund addresses the UN sustainable development goals. It aims to maximise the impact of research and innovation to improve lives and opportunity in the developing world.
Technology-EnaSystem-Integratedbled Model of Care Aiming to Improve the Health of Stroke Patients in Resource-Poor Settings in China JHSR 2 Full 2015 award to deliver an evidence-based care to patients in their villages and families. To improve their health status by training village doctors and family caregivers, equipping them with innovative digital health technology such as smartph The Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) supports cutting-edge research to address challenges faced by developing countries. The fund addresses the UN sustainable development goals. It aims to maximise the impact of research and innovation to improve lives and opportunity in the developing world.
Intermittent preventive treatment with dihydroartemisinin-piperaquine: a new malaria strategy to prevent adverse birth outcomes in Papua, Indonesia Global Maternal & Neo  award - Intermittent preventive treatment with dihydroartemisinin-piperaquine: a new malaria strategy to prevent adverse birth outcomes in Papua, Indonesia The Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) supports cutting-edge research to address challenges faced by developing countries. The fund addresses the UN sustainable development goals. It aims to maximise the impact of research and innovation to improve lives and opportunity in the developing world.
Feasibility Study: Effectiveness of Public Health System (Programmes/Policies) in Combating Severe Population Health Crisis in Ukraine Ukraine is a middle-income country within the WHO European region which has long faced significant population health crisis exacerbated by growing health inequalities within the country (rural/urban, male/female divide). It is one of the five countries in the region with the lowest life expectancy (11 years less than the EU average) and more than 10 years life expectancy gap between males and females. The health care and public health systems in the country remained virtually unchanged since independence in 1992 becoming completely inadequate to deal with the current challenges of growing epidemics of Non-Communicable Diseases and TB/HIV/AIDs epidemic.   Supported by the people of Ukraine, current government shows serious intentions to reform the country and use evidence in decision-making. Yet, given the dire state of the population health and political and economic difficulties, they are likely to opt out for a quick introduction of ready-made examples from other countries leaving the fundamental analysis of what does/did and does/did not work in a Ukrainian context for the future. Yet, we believe that evaluating past programmes/policies, as well as setting up the stage for the evaluation of future interventions would be crucial in designing reforms ensuring improvement of population health. Past experience of public health programmes/policies in Ukrainian context should not be wasted and in the full-scale study we would like to evalute such programmes/ policies to inform the development of effective PH system and facilitate its implementation.  To do this, we will first undertake a development study. This study will focus on the following things: (i) exploring the evolution of the public health programmes/policies at the national level and mapping their actual implementation across regions and over time, assessing their history, context, design and logic, (ii) assessing the availability and quality of the quantitative and qualitative data, (iii) assessing the potential for additional quantitative and qualitative data collection to enhance the possibilities for the evaluation of future public health programmes/policies, and (iv) reflect on the barriers to use evidence in health-related policy making in Ukraine.  This will allow us to select the programmes/polcies deemed evaluable to narrow down the focus of the full-scale study and refine the methodological approaches, provide recommendations as to the routine data collection to improve its quality, and introduce emerging public health community to the evidence based decision making. The Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) supports cutting-edge research to address challenges faced by developing countries. The fund addresses the UN sustainable development goals. It aims to maximise the impact of research and innovation to improve lives and opportunity in the developing world.
MRC-FAPESP: New approaches to the treatment of Paracoccidioidomycosis Humans have evolved complex and effective ways of fighting infections caused by microbes such as bacteria, parasites, fungi and viruses, the immune system. Sometimes the immune system goes wrong and this can cause serious diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and diabetes. Our research aims to understand at a molecular level how the cells of the immune system are able to recognise different microbes and the ways in which these cells respond to cause the familiar symptoms of an infection such as fever and tiredness, and to generate specific antibodies that fight the invading microbes. In this project we will study the way in which immune system cells are activated by sugar-binding proteins associated pathogenic yeasts and plants, in particular the way they bind and activate the Toll-like receptors of the innate immune system. Understanding the molecular basis for interactions between these pathogens and immune cells will allow us to carry out a screen to identify new candidate drugs that might be effective therapies for these important diseases. The Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) supports cutting-edge research to address challenges faced by developing countries. The fund addresses the UN sustainable development goals. It aims to maximise the impact of research and innovation to improve lives and opportunity in the developing world.
Partnership for a cross-disciplinary approach to the ecology of antimicrobial drug resistance in Kenya Antibacterial resistance (ABR) is a significant threat to the future of effective healthcare and veterinary care.  Globally, we are dependent on antibiotics for treating common as well as severe infections, but we abuse the value of these compounds by using them irrationally.  In Kenya, as in many other countries, antibiotics are prescribed un-necessarily and without properly identifying the micro-organims being targeted, a fact that often leads to treatment failures.  In agriculture, antibiotics are often used directly by farmers, as they are readily available on the market without prescription.  Kenya is a country undergoing a demographic transition towards urbanisation, with over half the population expected to be in urban zones by the middle of this century.  Many of these people are likely to live in low income settlements (eg 60% of residents of Nairobi, the capital, live in low income settlements = slums).  Provision of high quality heath care is lacking in such sites.  Further, with more people living in towns and cities, the pressure will be on farmers to produce more food more efficiently, and a key part of this - as has been the case in more developed economies - will be to use antibiotic drugs.  These factors combine to produce a great deal of risk for highly drug resistant micro-organisms to emerge.  Essential in preventing this will be to collect high quality data in hospitals and on farms, to understand what levels of resistance are present now, and how the organisms share their genes, a process that can result in rapid spread of resistant traits. A key aspects of this is also to understand how antibacterial drugs are used in practice, how they are procured and what drives individual and collective decision making about their use.  Our programme will investigate these different aspects and work with partners in Kenya and internationally who make policy, in order to develop long term surveillance tools, plans to limit the spread of resistance and advice to the public to conserve these important drugs. The Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) supports cutting-edge research to address challenges faced by developing countries. The fund addresses the UN sustainable development goals. It aims to maximise the impact of research and innovation to improve lives and opportunity in the developing world.
Understanding how viral innate immune evasion strategies affect adaptive immunity, and the application to vaccine development MRC IIB award understanding how viral innate immune evasion strategies affect adaptive immunity, and the application to vaccine development The Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) supports cutting-edge research to address challenges faced by developing countries. The fund addresses the UN sustainable development goals. It aims to maximise the impact of research and innovation to improve lives and opportunity in the developing world.
Promoting health and safety in traditional food markets to fight COVID-19 in Peru and Bolivia MRC GECO COVD award on how to promote health and safety in traditional food markets to fight COVID-19 in peru and Bolivia COVID-19 The Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) supports cutting-edge research to address challenges faced by developing countries. The fund addresses the UN sustainable development goals. It aims to maximise the impact of research and innovation to improve lives and opportunity in the developing world.