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£2.5million Wellcome Trust award for field trials
Dr Gordon Hamilton
The Wellcome Trust has awarded Dr Gordon Hamilton and co-applicant Dr Orin Courtenay of Warwick University, £2,562,995 for a Strategic Translation Award, "Field trials of synthetic sex pheromone to reduce visceral leishmaniasis (VL) transmission by Lutzomyia longipalpis in Brazil".
The 40 month project follows a successful University Translation Award awarded to Dr Hamilton in 2007, which demonstrated the feasibility of using sex pheromone as part of a "lure-and-kill" approach for controlling the sand fly L. longipalpis in the field.
Among parasites transmitted by insects, single-celled parasites of the genus Leishmania are second only to malaria parasites (transmitted by mosquitoes) in terms of their impact on health. Leishmania parasites cause the potentially fatal disease, visceral leishmaniasis, which affects half a million people worldwide each year.
Currently the disease is controlled by the use of therapeutic drugs. These can have unpleasant side effects for the patient because they are toxic, they are expensive, which limits availability, and may be difficult to administer because of poor health care infrastructure. There is also evidence of the parasite becoming resistant to drug treatments.
The strategy adopted by Dr Hamilton and his team has been to achieve vector control through an innovative 'lure-and-kill' approach, which targets the female sand flies. The Strategic Translation Award will allow Dr Hamilton and his colleagues, in collaboration with colleagues and agencies in Brazil, to determine if wide scale deployment of synthetic sex pheromone, with an appropriate insecticide treatment, will reduce the population of L. longipalpis and therefore VL incidence and infectiousness. The project will devise new ways to synthesise, formulate and present the sex pheromone and then measure the effects of a wide-scale intervention on sand fly abundance and disease incidence in a 3-arm cluster randomised trial. A significant additional commercial objective of the award is to develop the innovation to the point where it can be commercially exploited as a healthcare product.
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