Deadline: 13 May 2015
Pneumonia is the second leading cause of death amongst children globally, accounting for approximately 1 million deaths per year. There is an urgent need for new and better ways to prevent, diagnose and treat childhood pneumonia. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation through its Global Grand Challenge Exploration Round 2015 has given a challenge to develop new ways to reduce Childhood Pneumonia Deaths through Delivery of Timely Effective that focused on pneumococcal conjugate vaccine and other vaccines aimed at protecting young infants through a maternal immunization platform.
Challenge: Within this call to reduce pneumonia fatalities through innovations that improve diagnosis of pneumonia and referral of the high risk, malnourished child, we are looking for innovative ideas in the following specific areas:
- Identification of host response biomarkers for differentiation of bacterial and non-bacterial causes of pneumonia
- Field friendly, simple to use tools for assessment of malnutrition status in the sick child
Examples of ideas we will consider funding:
- Identification of host response biomarkers for differentiation of bacterial and non-bacterial causes of pneumonia
- Finding an ideal diagnostic biomarker for bacterial pneumonia that should not only allow an early diagnosis of the condition, but it should also allow differential diagnosis from non-bacterial causes of pneumonia as well as other non-infectious conditions.
- Host response biomarkers have the potential to emerge as indispensable tools. Developing an array of specific and validated biomarkers that could be translated into simple and easy to use test formats appropriate for use by a frontline healthcare worker in a developing country would be a big leap forward for pneumonia diagnosis and treatment.
- Field friendly, simple to use tools for assessment of malnutrition status in the sick child
- Identification of children with pneumonia that are either moderately or severely malnourished, and in need of referral to higher levels of care for administration of acute nutritional support, is a priority focus for the foundation’s Treatment Innovation and Delivery Initiative.
- Malnutrition status in developing countries is currently assessed by Measurement of Upper Arm Circumference (MUAC), measured on the left arm at the mid-point between the tip of the shoulder and the tip of the elbow.
- MUAC, the major determinants of which are muscle and sub-cutaneous fat, is a useful tool for fast assessment of nutritional status and in some studies MUAC alone, or MUAC for age, has predicted death in children better than any other anthropometric indicator.
- Beyond MUAC, alternative approaches to measure malnutrition status in a child may include use of novel technologies to measure density of fat deposits beneath the skin or application of cell phone, or other electronic technologies, to create easy to use anthropometric assessments of malnutrition status.
For more information about this topic, please visit GCE Childhood Pneumonia.
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