Funding outcome

Globally, 2.1 million children die of pneumonia every year. Most deaths occur in resource-poor settings, with countries in Africa and Asia reporting 2 to 10 times more child deaths from pneumonia than industrialized countries. The goal of this project is to accelerate the development of a triage tool for childhood pneumonia. This could be developed into a bedside, finger-prick blood test to help doctors decide which patients are the sickest and in need of lots of attention (like ICU admission, med-evac to a higher level hospital, and/or broad spectrum antibiotics). The tool we propose would be based on a biomarker (blood test). The name of the protein we are examining is sTIM-3. This protein is a driver of hyper-inflammation. We plan to validate sTIM-3 in a clinical setting by recruiting children with pneumonia from 20 hospitals in Uganda. We will measure biomarkers through blood samples and calculate how effective they are at predicting death due to pneumonia. With this evidence, our hope is to develop a cheap and effective test to help in the management pneumonia in low-resource settings, such as Uganda or the Canadian North. Because pneumonia is such a common cause of death in children around the world, advances like this one could be used to save lives by targeting interventions to children that need them the most.