This story originally published on April 21, 2015 in observance of the COPH’s 30^th anniversary celebration.

Three Distinguished USF Health Professors in the Department of Global Health at the USF College of Public Health – Drs. Tom Unnasch, John Adams and Dennis Kyle – are ranked among the university’s best externally-funded investigators in terms of research dollars, and two are in the top five. A major focus of their research is malaria.

A fourth Global Health professor, Dr. Michael White, published a groundbreaking study just last month that may revolutionize the global fight against malaria.

Unnasch, the department chair, said much of Global Health’s research funding comes from external grants from the National Institutes of Health, primarily the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has come through with what he called “a substantial portfolio of funding”: a $4.5-million grant to Adams this year for developing new drugs and researching new genetic targets for malaria.

Kyle and Adams also have established collaborations with the Draper Laboratory to conduct research with artificial livers to study malaria in livers, which also is funded by the Gates Foundation, Unnasch said.

The combination of expertise and generous funding has helped put the department on the global cutting edge and in the thick of international connections that will help keep it there.

“The department is becoming quite well-known now as a research institution for malaria and other vector-borne diseases,” Unnasch said. “We have lots of good collaborations with people in Thailand at Mahidol University, and a lot of collaborations with people in Africa. There’s also quite a bit of contact between our department and people in the mosquito control field here in the state of Florida.”

Unnasch said those include regular work with the Florida Mosquito Control Association (of which Unnasch is on the board of directors), the Department of Health Laboratories, the Florida Department of Health, and various research projects with mosquito control in Hillsborough, Pasco, Manatee, Volusia and St. Johns counties, as well as with the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District in Monroe County.

For mosquito researchers, Unnasch said, the reason is obvious. For everyone else, it might be alarming.

“Florida’s the best place in the country if you want to do research on mosquito-transmitted diseases,” he said. “There are four arthropod-borne viruses, or arbovirus, infections that occur in the United States, and three out of the four are endemic to Florida. That’s why Florida spends $75-100 million a year on mosquito control. Only California spends more.”

Last month, the College of Public Health made headlines as Dr. Michael White, a professor in the College of Public Health’s Department of Global Health and the Morsani College of Medicine’s Department of Molecular Medicine, led a team of researchers that became the first to uncover part of the mysterious process by which malaria-related parasites spread at explosive and deadly rates inside humans and other animals.

As drug-resistant malaria threatens to become a major public health crisis, the findings could potentially lead to a powerful new treatment for malaria-caused illnesses that kill more than 600,000 people a year.

In a study published online March 3 in the high-impact journal PLOS Biology, the USF researchers and their colleagues at the University of Georgia discovered how these ancient parasites manage to replicate their chromosomes up to thousands of times before spinning off into daughter cells with perfect similitude – all the while avoiding cell death.

Malaria caused about 207 million cases and 627,000 deaths in 2012, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  About 3.2 billion people, or nearly half the world’s population, are at risk of malaria, according to the World Health Organization.

White said that this study, which he called the first for a USF Health laboratory in publishing original research in PLOS Biology, will help get more potential treatments in the pipeline.

“The more we understand their vulnerability,” he said of the parasites, “the better chance we can keep that pipeline full.”

With the collective efforts and expertise of Drs. Adams, Kyle, Unnasch and White, the USF College of Public Health will remain on the front lines of the fight against one of the world’s most daunting health threats.

Related stories:
USF-led study sheds light on how malaria parasites grow exponentially
New antimalarial drug with novel mechanism of action
Dr. Dennis Kyle receives NIH award to understand extreme drug resistance in malaria
Dr. John Adams leads workshop for Gates Foundation scientists conducting malaria research

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Vector-borne-disease expert Dr. Robert Novak, a USF College of Public Health professor of global health, recently returned from the 2018 Grand Challenges Annual Meeting, held in October in Berlin, Germany.

The Grand Challenges Annual Meeting is a scientific convening to foster collaboration among partners to solve the world’s most pressing health and development challenges.

It provides researchers with an opportunity to share their work and learn about advances in their own field and in others. This year’s Grand Challenges meeting was sponsored by a variety of organizations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, USAID, the African Academy of Sciences and Grand Challenges Canada.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel gave a keynote address.

Novak participated in roundtable discussions that primarily dealt with pest and disease surveillance for human, livestock and crop health.

Robert Novak, PhD, was invited to attend the 2018 Global Challenges Annual Meeting held in Berlin. (Photo courtesy of USF Health)

“One of the things we focused on were agricultural problems and how they relate to public health,” Novak said. “For example, the way rice fields in Uganda and Kenya are irrigated promotes the growth of mosquitos. If we’re going to figure out how to increase the yield of rice and minimize the growth of mosquitos, we have to involve both groups. The Grand Challenges meeting helped bring together these groups for collaboration and team building.”

One of the outcomes of the meeting for Novak was a partnership with colleagues at The Ohio State University. The partnership was formed to study the southern armyworm, an insect pest, and plant rusts damaging crops in Africa.

“We want to see if we can create markers for these pests so we can detect them earlier and eliminate them before they cause a lot of destruction,” explained Novak, who has submitted a joint proposal with colleague Dr. Enrico Borello from The Ohio State University for a $200,000 “proof of concept” grant from the Gates Foundation to work on the project.

“We will look at the destruction of a plant by these rusts and armyworms and then create a spectral signature [reflectance across a light spectrum] for each one showing the difference in the plant as the destruction grows,” he said. Once we can ‘prove the concept’ regarding the specificity of spectral signatures in the greenhouse, we can take our idea out for field trials, most probably in Africa where there is a growing problem.”

Novak says a huge benefit of the meeting was the give-and-take between disciplines.

“There is so much information and technology that can be shared between fields,” he noted. “What we know from one discipline can be utilized by another. It was an incredibly stimulating and interactive five days.”

Story by Donna Campisano, USF College of Public Health

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The USF College of Public Health announced on June 15 that it is a Grand Challenges Explorations winner, an initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  Dr. Takudzwa Sayi, a post-doctoral scholar in the Maternal and Child Health Center of Excellence in Education, Practice, and Science in the Department of Community and Family Health, will pursue an innovative global health and development research project titled, “Perspectives on Side-Effects of Hormonal Contraceptives.”

Grand Challenges Explorations (GCE) supports innovative thinkers worldwide to explore ideas that can break the mold in how we solve persistent global health and development challenges. Sayi’s project is one of 28 Grand Challenges Explorations Round 18 grants announced today by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Dr. Takudzwa Sayi, post-doctoral scholar in the Department of Community of Family Health, has been awarded a Gates Foundation Grand Challenges Explorations grant to study side effects of hormonal contraceptives among women in Zimbabwe. (Photo by Anna Mayor)

To receive funding, Sayi and other Grand Challenges Explorations winners demonstrated in a two-page online application a bold idea in one of four critical global heath and development topic areas. The foundation will be accepting applications for the next GCE round in September 2017.

The $100,000 grant will allow Sayi to collect data from users of hormonal contraceptives, such as the pill and IUDs, who experience or express concerns about side-effects associated with these methods in Zimbabwe.

She will document contraceptive use decision-making while navigating perceived and expressed concerns. Additionally, the project will include interviews with family planning providers to get their perspectives on side-effects of hormonal methods and how they perceive women deal with them.

“Getting this chance to work on research that will help women and their partners achieve their sexual and/or reproductive goals is exciting,” Sayi said. “Zimbabwe has one of the highest contraceptive use rates in sub-Saharan Africa, and a majority of users use hormonal contraceptives, yet concerns with side or health effects continue to be motivations for discontinuing use or avoiding future use of these methods.”

According to Sayi, the project will use journey mapping as an innovative method for collecting comprehensive data use decision making to understand how women leverage sources of information about methods and side-effects, deal with negative and positive experiences and feelings with methods and providers, and navigate other contextual factors governing decisions to use contraceptives.

“We expect that the finding of this research will help increase correct and/or consistent use of contraceptives, draw inexperienced users, and highlight areas in which new contraceptive technologies might be focused,” Sayi said. “The perspectives of family planning providers will provide an additional perspective from the supply side, which we hope will help achieve these goals of meeting women and their partners’ family planning needs.”

This is Sayi’s first grant-funded research opportunity.

“[This grant] gives me the opportunity to develop into the kind of researcher that I would like to be in the future. I am grateful to the Bill and Melinda Gates Grant Challenges Explorations for the opportunity,” she said. “This type of research is important to me because it can help make positive impacts on families and communities.”

Story by Anna Mayor, USF College of Public Health 

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“When you see the kids who have nothing, it changes you,” said Dr. Ben Jacob, “and when you see the ones who are blind on top of it, it changes you even more.  You come back to your American life here, you cruise around town, go to McDonald’s, whatever, but you can’t help thinking about them.”

Jacob, a research assistant professor in the USF College of Public Health’s Department of Global Health, recently returned from working “towards eradication,” he is careful to say, of onchocerciasis, or river blindness, in Uganda and Burkina Faso, the third-poorest nation on the African continent and one of the poorest on the planet.  He is part of an initiative that is making rapid headway there, and he is excited to be part of the reason.

“Onchocerciasis is a disease caused by Simulium Damnosum s.l., a species of fly that habitats along rivers – along the river edges, to be exact,” Jacob explained.  “It’s commonly seen in Africa.  It used to be in South America, but the incidence is getting less and less in the western hemisphere.  Unfortunately, in Africa, it’s still very predominant.  The problem is that it causes blindness, especially in children, and the tragedy behind it is that it’s preventable if we focus on the habitat instead of post-treatment clinical strategies solely.”

The tragedy also goes well beyond the blinded child, he said.  In northern Africa’s nations wracked by civil war and abject poverty, there are no schools for the blind, and in an agro-economic society, every child lost to blindness represents a missing workforce and “a very big disadvantage,” he said, to a family already practically defined by disadvantage.

Jacob, who has been working to fight disease in Africa for five years, is part of a global initiative backed by The Carter Center, the World Health Organization and the Gates Foundation to halt transmission of the disease.  Since it’s spread by black flies, eliminating the flies has become the focus.

Brought into the effort by Global Health’s chair, Dr. Tom Unnasch, Jacob has applied his specialties – geographic information systems and spatial modeling – to the effort.  So far, it’s proving to be a dramatic step in the right direction after decades of failed efforts to control the disease.

“In the ’70s, what they were doing was treating the rivers with insecticide,” Jacob said.  “It was non-targeted, very global.  It was just sprayed along the rivers to inhibit the larval production of the habitat.”

Among the major drawbacks of that approach, Jacob said, was the expense, since the only practical way to spray such vast areas was by helicopter.

“Rivers can go on forever, especially African rivers,” he said.  “They have multiple tributaries, so even though you may treat one location, it may not affect the whole area.  So, it was not a cost-effective methodology, nor was it good for prevention.”

Unnasch thought Jacob’s work with global information systems to identify mosquito habitats to combat malaria could just as easily be applied to the war on black flies.

The enemy, Simulium Damnosum s.l., the tiny black fly that spreads onchocerciasis, commonly known as river blindness.

“I was brought in as a mathematician/modeler to determine where the high-prevalence canopied S. Damnosum s.l. habitats were using newer state-of-the-art cartographic- and informatic-based technology,” Jacob said.  “I started using GIS, and I was able to get a spectral imprint – i.e., target reflectance biosignature – off one habitat.  Every object,” he explained, “has a unique spectral signature that is reflected off its surface – you, a car, a tree, anything.”

Jacob took a spectral signature off a particular habitat along a river and withdrew the wavelengths by color to determine the percentage of each in the signature.  The rest is every bit as technical as it is fascinating.

“I was able to spectrally extract and decompose a pixel that represented the percentage of red, green, blue and all the other canopy colors of that habitat,” he said, “and then, within the GIS, utilize that percentage contribution of each wavelength and find every single other one inside of a scene.  Initially, I ran an algorithm inside of GIS using a large riverine scene of an area in western Africa to determine a signature that I originally withdrew from a capture point habitat, and then found all the other ones that were similar.”

Jacob had first tested his idea two years ago in Togo, he said.

“I found one signature,” he said, “and I took that one spectral signature and displaced the percentage components of the wavelengths on a whole image, and the GIS found me all the georeferenceable sites of the canopied habitats – a predictive geo-spectrotemporal model, in other words.”

The results of that test in Togo were nothing less than startling: Human follow-up investigations on the ground – known as “ground-truthing” – put the predictive method’s accuracy at 100 percent.  Excited by his findings, Jacob returned to COPH to share the news with Global Health colleagues, especially Unnasch and Dr. Robert Novak, a professor of medical entomology.  The message was a simple revelation with profound implications:  They could find all the habitats without having to move field teams, a particularly cost-prohibitive exercise in Africa.

The response from COPH’s renowned vector-borne disease experts was to give it a double-blind study:  Apply the methodology to another region – specifically, northern Uganda, on the other side of Africa – and we’ll see how good it is.

“In other words, they would show me a country, but they wouldn’t tell me where the disease was,” Jacob said.  “I would show them where it was.  They obviously knew.”

The result of that second test was almost as encouraging as the first.

“When I took the percentage signature and then ran it in a scene from northern Uganda,” Jacob said, “I found all the habitats predicted in my model using GIS.  The second phase of it was to ground-truth it.  We found 92.8 percent, which was remarkable.  We were using a signal that was extrapolated in west Africa, and we interpolated habitats in east Africa.  So now, what that’s really telling us is, we have the capability, today, to find all the habitats.”

The next step, he said, was going to be the harder part.

“Yes, our model performance was extremely adequate.  The problem is, now what do we do for prevention?  We found it scientifically.  We have a great model, but what about controlling the disease?”

Jacob’s answer is a campaign he calls “Slash and Clear.”

“The idea is, once we’ve found these canopied trailing vegetation, based on the predictive model, we will seek and train individuals at the village level to remove them, using machetes, and that’s exactly what we did in our last project,” he said.  “And then we conducted clinical trials.  We put up some fly traps in the initial stage.  We saw reductions well over 60 percent in some of our targeted villages within a week.

“Once we are able to control the adult emergence of the disease – the flies – obviously, we would have fewer flies biting, and logically we would have less disease transmission.  So, we’re just using common sense,” he said.  “Destroy the location where the immatures are being produced, you have less emergence of adults, you have less transmission of disease.  Very simple concept.”

Jacob in northern Uganda during his most recent trip there to fight river blindness.

Jacob is pumped with enthusiasm to see the project through to a successful conclusion, and the closer he gets to making that reality, the more pumped he gets.

“We are able now not only to find the habitats very cost-effectively and in very quick time,” he said pointedly, “but we are actually able to go ahead and remove the significant habitats.  I think the next year of our project will be to remove all habitats around these village complexes, to eliminate and to eventually eradicate the disease.”

And sometimes, in science or anything else, the best defense is a good offense.

“We’re focusing on the habitat,” Jacob said.  “Instead of playing defense – putting up bed nets, for example – we’re playing offense.  That’s actually the campaign we’re running in Uganda:  ‘Slash and Clear.’”

Jacob said he’s confident of the method’s universal applicability and is already expanding its use.

“Now we’re using that same signal in Angola, we’re moving towards Nigeria, and we’re also using it in Togo.  If you gave me a scene in Zimbabwe, I could find you all the oncho habitats by the end of the day,” he said emphatically, “by the end of the day!”

“I’ve taken it personally, honestly,” he continued, “because I know we’re close to coming to a conclusion, and I feel, as a scientist, that this is the closest I’ve ever come.  I’m really excited about being a part of this team.  I think, in this type of environment, the only thing we as scientists can do is be more vigilant about how we can pursue eradication tools, and I think what we have right now – and obviously, I’m being biased – but I think we have one of the best capabilities.  I don’t think we’ve come this close on any other disease that I’ve ever worked on – none, and I’ve worked on a lot.  That’s why I feel very excited about this project.  I really think we can make this disease go away.”

Story by David Brothers, photos courtesy of Dr. Ben Jacbob, College of Public Health.

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With “Invest in the Future: Defeat Malaria” as the theme, the celebratory week included a wide range of events that brought malaria to the forefront of discussion. However, for two USF College of Public Health professors, malaria is on the forefront every day.

John H. Adams, PhD and Dennis E. Kyle, PhD work extensively on malaria in their Global Health Infectious Diseases Research labs. The Adams’ team studies malaria parasite biology with the expectation that a greater understanding of Plasmodium biology will enable developing better ways to control malaria through vaccines, drugs, and other prevention strategies. In October, Adams and colleagues received a $4.5M grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The award funds an international consortium of five institutions on a 2-year continuation of a project to develop in vitro blood-stage culture of Plasmodium vivax.

Before joining USF, Dr. Kyle worked as a senior scientist in the malaria drug program at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and the Australian Army Malaria Institute. A Distinguished University Health Professor, Dr. Kyle’s research team focuses on the discovery and development of new antiparasitic drugs and elucidation of mechanisms of antimalarial drug resistance. Last fall, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded him $2.9M for a 2-year continuation of a project to explore the in vitro liver-stages of Plasmodium vivax with the use of a small scale Liver Microfluidics Device. In January, the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene named him a Fellow and the Medicines for Malaria Venture appointed him to their Expert Scientific Advisory Committee.

Without question, great strides are being made to eliminate malaria and this is due in part to infectious disease researchers like Drs. Adams and Kyle. To learn more about academic and research opportunities involving malaria, visit the Department of Global Health.

Story by Victoria Danforth, USF College of Public Health.

-General Statement-

Established in 1984 as the first school of public health in the State of Florida, the USF College of Public Health is a recognized leader in community health, online education, maternal and child health, social marketing, and global infectious disease research. Fully accredited by the Council on Education for Public Health, the college offers 25 concentrations that lead to MHA, MPH, MSPH, DrPH, and PhD degrees, as well as a BSPH, several dual degrees, graduate certificates, and online programs. To learn more about the college committed to passionately solve problems and create conditions that allow every person the universal right to health and well-being, visit www.publichealth.usf.edu.

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Gates Foundation awards $100,000 grant to Dr. Thomas Unnasch

Distinguished University Health Professor Thomas Unnasch, PhD, and colleagues, are the recipients of a $100,00 Grand Challenge Explorations Grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The award funds the investigators for “New Approaches for Detection, Treatment, and Control of Selected Neglected Tropical Diseases.”

A team of researchers at the USF College of Public Health and the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in the United Kingdom will create ”High-Resolution Ecological Mapping of Filarial Vectors.” According to their grant application, the “tools will map the locations and chart the habitats of vectors of several parasitic worm infections to promote safer and more effective control strategies.”

Dr. Unnasch is one of the world’s leading experts on onchocerciasis, or river blindness, a rare parasitic disease spread by the bite of a black fly that breeds in fast-flowing rivers. In October, he was named Distinguished University Health Professor, the highest honor bestowed on a member of the USF Health faculty.

As chair of the Department of Global Health, Dr. Unnasch oversees more than 10 concentrations that lead to MPH, MSPH, DrPH, and PhD degrees, as well several dual degrees, graduate certificates, and special programs. Most recently, Global Health added an online master of public health degree in infection control to its academic offerings.

Related stories:
Dr. Thomas Unnasch named Distinguished University Health Professor
Defeating river blindness one village at a time [VIDEO]

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