Analysis of research intensity on infectious disease by disease burden reveals which infectious diseases are neglected by researchers

Furuse, Yuki

doi:10.1073/pnas.1814484116

Cited by 60 publications

(46 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…The burden of NTDs is mostly nonexistent in affluent countries; instead, they predominantly affect the world’s poor, and are therefore less interesting for commercial research, as the chance of return of investment is limited. There is little incentive for affluent countries to deal with many NTDs, mainly due to the low impact these diseases have on the population of these countries [ 24 ]. This is also visible in drug development where, from 1975 to 2004, only 1% of drugs were developed for NTDs (21 out of 1556) [ 3 ].…”

Section: Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Point of Care Diagnostics in Resource-Limited Settings: A Review of the Present and Future of PoC in Its Most Needed Environment

et al. 2020

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Point of care (PoC) diagnostics are at the focus of government initiatives, NGOs and fundamental research alike. In high-income countries, the hope is to streamline the diagnostic procedure, minimize costs and make healthcare processes more efficient and faster, which, in some cases, can be more a matter of convenience than necessity. However, in resource-limited settings such as low-income countries, PoC-diagnostics might be the only viable route, when the next laboratory is hours away. Therefore, it is especially important to focus research into novel diagnostics for these countries in order to alleviate suffering due to infectious disease. In this review, the current research describing the use of PoC diagnostics in resource-limited settings and the potential bottlenecks along the value chain that prevent their widespread application is summarized. To this end, we will look at literature that investigates different parts of the value chain, such as fundamental research and market economics, as well as actual use at healthcare providers. We aim to create an integrated picture of potential PoC barriers, from the first start of research at universities to patient treatment in the field. Results from the literature will be discussed with the aim to bring all important steps and aspects together in order to illustrate how effectively PoC is being used in low-income countries. In addition, we discuss what is needed to improve the situation further, in order to use this technology to its fullest advantage and avoid “leaks in the pipeline”, when a promising device fails to take the next step of the valorization pathway and is abandoned.

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Section: Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Point of Care Diagnostics in Resource-Limited Settings: A Review of the Present and Future of PoC in Its Most Needed Environment

et al. 2020

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“…Furthermore, using burden-adjusted research intensity, RSV research is underfunded and has seen a decline in spending during a period when influenza research has been progressively better funded. 2 In this review, we examine the epidemiology, immunology and contemporary research landscape of RSV disease in both children and in adults.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV): a scourge from infancy to old age

Coultas¹,

Smyth²,

Openshaw³

2019

Thorax

122

110

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Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is the most common single cause of respiratory hospitalisation of infants and is the second largest cause of lower respiratory infection mortality worldwide. In adults, RSV is an under-recognised cause of deterioration in health, particularly in frail elderly persons. Infection rates typically rise in late autumn and early winter causing bronchiolitis in infants, common colds in adults and insidious respiratory illness in the elderly. Virus detection methods optimised for use in children have low detection rate in adults, highlighting the need for better diagnostic tests. There are many vaccines under development, mostly based on the surface glycoprotein F which exists in two conformations (prefusion and postfusion). Much of the neutralising antibody appears to be to the prefusion form. Vaccines being developed include live attenuated, subunit, particle based and live vectored agents. Different vaccine strategies may be appropriate for different target populations: at-risk infants, school-age children, adult caregivers and the elderly. Antiviral drugs are in clinical trial and may find a place in disease management. RSV disease is one of the major remaining common tractable challenges in infectious diseases and the era of vaccines and antivirals for RSV is on the near horizon.

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“…In our analysis, ε is also assumed to be uncorrelated. Thus, the regression equation can be written as: (1) where b i are the regression coefficients, x i are independent variables, and ε is the stochastic error associated with the regression.…”

Section: Bioinformatics Analysis Of Metagenome Datasetsmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Improved Approach to Identify Bacterial Pathogens to Human in Environmental Metagenome

Yang

Howe

Lee

et al. 2020

J. Microbiol. Biotechnol.

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Bacterial pathogens and their association with diseases have long been major public health concerns around the world. It is estimated that 10 million people died of infectious diseases in 2016 [1, 2]. Our ability to identify and track these pathogens in the environment is important to understand their risks in the environment and our lives [3, 4]. Several approaches have been used to detect and identify pathogens in the environment. The culturedependent method, which selectively grows and isolates cultivable pathogens, has been considered as a standard methodology. The culture-dependent method has the advantage of widely accessible and cost-effective [5]. The challenge of this approach is that many pathogens in the environment exist in a viable but non-culturable (VBNC) state, which leads to limited detection and underestimation of total pathogens in the environmental samples [6, 7]. To circumvent these drawbacks, molecular biological tools such as real-time quantitative PCR (qPCR) and sequencing-based approaches have been adopted to detect and identify the bacterial pathogens in the environment [8-12]. qPCR is a highly sensitive and specific method to reliably quantify the pathogenic genes in the environment using gene probes designed to target specific genes of interest. qPCR method relies on the specificity and sensitivity of primer sets to amplify the target genes. Consequently, when the number of target genes is large or unspecified, this approach is not always appropriate to identify genes associated with pathogens in the environment due to both practical and economic reasons [13, 14]. Recently, shotgun high-throughput sequencing of metagenomes from environmental microbial communities has been applied to identify bacterial pathogens in diverse environments [11, 12]. Several curated databases and tools, including the Meta-multilocus sequence typing (MLST), virulence factor database (VFDB), and pathosystems resource integration center (PATRIC), have been developed to annotate pathogens in metagenomes [15-17]. Each database is used to identify bacterial pathogens based on sequence homology to genes associated The identification of bacterial pathogens to humans is critical for environmental microbial risk assessment. However, current methods for identifying pathogens in environmental samples are limited in their ability to detect highly diverse bacterial communities and accurately differentiate pathogens from commensal bacteria. In the present study, we suggest an improved approach using a combination of identification results obtained from multiple databases, including the multilocus sequence typing (MLST) database, virulence factor database (VFDB), and pathosystems resource integration center (PATRIC) databases to resolve current challenges. By integrating the identification results from multiple databases, potential bacterial pathogens in metagenomes were identified and classified into eight different groups. Based on the distribution of genes in each group, we proposed an equation to calculate the metagenom...

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Analysis of research intensity on infectious disease by disease burden reveals which infectious diseases are neglected by researchers

Cited by 60 publications

References 18 publications

Point of Care Diagnostics in Resource-Limited Settings: A Review of the Present and Future of PoC in Its Most Needed Environment

Point of Care Diagnostics in Resource-Limited Settings: A Review of the Present and Future of PoC in Its Most Needed Environment

Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV): a scourge from infancy to old age

An Improved Approach to Identify Bacterial Pathogens to Human in Environmental Metagenome

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