Tropical Diseases and Cure

Translational Strategies to Prevent NTD’s & Infectious Diseases

The World Health Organization has already declared 17 major pathogenic and related infections as the neglected tropical diseases. Despite various achievements in the understanding of the nature and universality of NTDs, as well as successes in recent scaled-up preventive chemotherapy methods and other health involvements, the NTDs continue to rank among the world’s foremost global health problems. For virtually all of the NTDs, additional control mechanisms and various advanced tools are needed, including, vaccines, diagnostics, and vector control agents and new NTD drugs strategies. Elimination will not be possible without implementation of various innovative tools. Here we will discuss some of the key challenges in translational science to develop and introduce these new innovative technologies in order to ensure success in global elimination efforts.

Translational research is precisely defined as the process of applying ideas, insights and discoveries generated through basic scientific inquiry to the treatment or prevention of infectious diseases. The recent evolution in next-generation sequencing techniques and the introduction of high-throughput methods has resulted in an explosive cascade of research applications, spanning from target identification to diagnostics and therapeutics. These technical advances have provided the impetus for some radical changes in the way research itself is conceived and performed.