Grand Challenges is a family of initiatives fostering innovation to solve key global health and development problems. Each initiative is an experiment in the use of challenges to focus innovation on making an impact. Individual challenges address some of the same problems, but from differing perspectives. This Call-to-Action provides an opportunity for Grand Challenges Annual Meeting participants to take action based on ideas they developed and people they met at the meeting. As noted by past applicants in their submitted proposals, the meeting provides diverse ways to combine expertise and perspectives to speed the impact of what would otherwise be separate work by individual investigators. The grants awarded for past Call-to-Action opportunities show this, and we hope that this year’ meeting will also provide ways to catalyze collaborative projects that yield a tangible solution to a key problem by the end of the grant.
Scalable Drug-Resistance Profiling of Tuberculosis and Malaria Using mCARMEN
Cameron Myhrvold of Princeton University and Mireille Kamariza of the University of California, Los Angeles, both in the U.S., will develop an assay to rapidly detect multiple drug resistance mutations in Plasmodium falciparum and Mycobacterium tuberculosis for malaria and tuberculosis (TB) surveillance, respectively. Malaria and TB are two of the world’s deadliest infectious diseases. Rapid and accurate drug resistance testing can save lives but current assays are slow or difficult to scale. Combinatorial Arrayed Reactions for Multiplexed Evaluation of Nucleic acids (CARMEN) is a CRISPR-based diagnostic test that detects nucleic acid biomarkers, such as those in pathogens, with high specificity and throughput. They have developed microfluidic CARMEN (mCARMEN), which produces results in under five hours, and will use an algorithm to design assays that detect the top ten drug-resistant P. falciparum mutations from blood samples, and M. tuberculosis mutations from saliva samples that confer resistance to two first-line TB drugs.