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Surveilling Malaria through machine learning and clustering tools in pregnancy

Project description

Malaria surveillance in pregnant women

Malaria remains a significant health threat in certain parts of the world, necessitating effective surveillance systems. The EU-funded PregMal project aims to eliminate malaria transmission by combining molecular, serological and genomic data from pregnant women collected at antenatal care (ANC) clinics. Pregnant women are emerging as a promising, easily accessible group for malaria surveillance given their frequent visits to ANC clinics. Scientists will perform statistical analysis to determine whether data from pregnant women reflect the temporal and spatial malaria trends in the general population. Genetic analysis of the malaria parasites will provide insight into changes of parasite transmission or the introduction of new parasites into the community.

Objective

The vision of the World Health Organisation (WHO) for 2030 is a world free of malaria. For this, agile and robust malaria surveillance systems are required to efficiently guide actions towards interruption of transmission. Estimating malaria trends from passive detection of clinical malaria cases at health facilities or from cross-sectional surveys remains difficult and expensive.

Pregnant women represent a promising convenience group for malaria surveillance, providing a representative section of the overall population in a cost-efficient and sustainable manner. Serological and molecular surveillance has also become a potential key approach to guide elimination efforts, providing information about the history of exposure, the geographic origin (malaria importation) and the intensity of malaria transmission. Here we propose to develop and apply novel statistical tools (adapted from the field of cosmology) to test an innovative and cost-efficient surveillance approach based on the strategic use of parasitological, serological and genomic data from easy-access pregnant women at antenatal care (ANC) clinics. The application of these new tools on data obtained from pregnant women can suppose an enormous breakthrough for sustainable and actionable surveillance systems that can accelerate efforts towards malaria elimination. With these new developed tools I will a) assess the potential of parasitological and serological data from pregnant women at first ANC visit as a source of reliable data to reflect temporal and spatial malaria trends in the community and b) compare genetic metrics in the parasite population of pregnant women and the overall community that can inform about changes of malaria transmission, clustering of infections and parasite importation.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

Keywords

Programme(s)

Topic(s)

Funding Scheme

MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)

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Call for proposal

(opens in new window) H2020-MSCA-IF-2019

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Coordinator

FUNDACION PRIVADA INSTITUTO DE SALUD GLOBAL BARCELONA
Net EU contribution
€ 172 932,48
Address
C ROSSELLO 132 PLANTA 05
08036 Barcelona
Spain
Region
Este Cataluña Barcelona
Activity type
Research Organisations
Links
Total cost
€ 172 932,48