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The "Sonderforschungsbereich" (collabora-
tive special research grant) entitled "Control
of tropical infectious diseases "of the German
Science Foundation (DFG) comprised
between 15 and 20 research groups and
was acquired in 1999 with Rainer Sauerborn
as the founding speaker and re-evaluated
every three years. The research project
lasted 12 years. It was led by Hans-Georg
Kräusslich (Dept. of Virology) in the last nine
years of its existence. The SFB comprised at
its start six groups of the Institute of Public
Health, two from biochemistry, one form
parasitology and virology respectively, two
from the Central Institute for Molecular bio-
logy research groups of the EMBL (Kafatos),
the Biochemistry Department (Schirmer
and Krauth-Siegel), the Department of
Economics (Schmidt), and the Departments
of Parasitology (Lanzer). The underlying
concept of the research project was to
look at new interventions and potential
barriers for the control of infectious tropical
diseases from the bench to the bed and to
the community, from "gene to society". The
collaborative grant became a condensation
kernel for interdisciplinary research within
the University of Heidelberg and produced a
large number of scientific papers, doctoral
dissertations and contributed to the training
of many young scientists.
As an illustrative example for the develop-
ment of new drugs and vaccines against
tropical infectious diseases, a recombinant
malaria vaccine was develop against a para-
sitic target structure, the merozoite surface
protein (MSP-1) protein by the group of Her-
mann Bujard. Heiner Schirmer re-discovered
methylene blue as a potent antimalarial and
characterized it structurally and functionally.
In combination with other antimalarials,
the latter drug has been tested in clinical
trials, led by Olaf Müller. Since children’s
urine will turn green during the treatment
and accompanying study of collaborating
anthro-pologists explored whether this
would be a barrier for drug use and reported
that it was actually not. Drugs and vaccines
are only useful tools when and if they reach
the women, children and men for which they
have been designed. In Africa, only between
10% and 40% of those suffering from malaria
seek modern health care and have access to
drugs. The main barrier is the high costs for
obtaining care and buying drugs. Within the
SFB and in collaboration with the Ministry
of health, a group of the HIPH achieved an
evidence-based design of a community-
based health insurance scheme.
The SFB received core funding form the
Ministry of Science of the State of Baden-
Württemberg for our main research partner,
the "Centre de Recherche en Santé de
Nouna", in Burkina Faso. This allowed the
construction of on site state-of-the-art labs,
SFB 544 (1999-2011)
The Collaborative Research Centre 544
(Control of Tropical Infectious Diseases)
This large and successful research program
has been running since the year 1999 and
ended in mid-2011. The HIPH has been
among the founding members of this pro-
gram and has regularly contributed to the
high quality of this collaborative research.