Nutritional Iron Deficiency and Malaria: Impact of a Public-Private Partnership
Abstract Objectives Background: In 2007 the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) collaborated to address concerns about the safety and efficacy of interventions to prevent and treat nutritional iron deficiency (NID) particularly in the context of malaria. The “Iron and Malaria Project” (IMP) addressed how iron might not be safe, iron assessment, and the value of interventions to address NID. This presentation will: Describe the novel approach used to achieve the IMP goals, describe the IMP accomplishments and impacts, and summarize lessons learned. Methods The IMP had: 1) Research Track: NICHD initiated 2 funding opportunity announcements resulting in 10 funded projects; 2) Translation Track: a) consultations with global stakeholders; b) risk: benefit analyses on the use of interventions to prevent and treat NID; c) a collaboration with the CDC to develop standards for a sTfR assay; d) the BOND project to harmonize the process for discovery, development and deployment of nutrient biomarkers; e) the INSPIRE project, a review of extant evidence on reciprocal relationships between nutrition and inflammation; and f) the BRINDA project, a collaboration with the CDC, GAIN, and WHO to study the impact of inflammation on interpretation of biomarkers of iron and other determinants of anemia and develop approaches to account for this interaction. Results Funded grants included 4 basic science projects exploring mechanisms to explain iron and malaria interactions and 6 clinical studies addressing various aspects of the iron malaria relationship. To date, 72 journal publications have resulted. Using the NIH Relative Citation Ratio metric, 2/3 have scientific influence scores ≥the 50th percentile of all NIH-funded research publications and 15 have scores ≥ the 90th percentile. Conclusions The IMP leveraged the attributes of this public-private partnership between BMGF and NICHD/NIH to accomplish its goals. The partnership's complementarity and synergy resulted in broad traction and collaboration with a global community invested in solving the challenges of iron and malaria. Funding Sources BMGF $9.3 million, NIH Office of Dietary Supplements $1.3 million.