Leishmaniasis is named after William Leishman, a Glasgwegian doctor serving with the British Army in India, who first identified the parasite in the early 1900s. The disease is the second biggest killer in Africa, [...]]]> Researchers at the University of Dundee have identified fexinidazole as a possible, much-needed, new treatment for the parasitic disease visceral leishmaniasis.

Source: Wikipedia

Leishmaniasis is named after William Leishman, a Glasgwegian doctor serving with the British Army in India, who first identified the parasite in the early 1900s. The disease is the second biggest killer in Africa, Asia and Latin America after malaria, and affects 500,000 people, killing about 50-60,000 patients per year. Current drug treatments for the disease are unsatisfactory for reasons such as high cost, drug resistance or the need for hospitalisation.

Fexinidazole is already in phase 1 clinical trials for a related disease – African sleeping sickness – but a research team at Dundee including Dr Susan Wyllie, Professor Alan Fairlamb and colleagues has identified it as having potential in treating leishmaniasis.

Their research has been published by the journal Science Translational Medicine, and was funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Tests in mice showed that the drug has a greater than 98% rate of suppressing infection of leishmaniasis, comparable to current treatments such as miltefosine and Pentostam.

These and other existing treatment options all suffer from disadvantages; they are not always safe, effective or easy to administer. The only oral drug miltefosine cannot be given to women of child-bearing age due to a substantial risk of birth defects; other drugs are costly and have to be given by injection. Thus there is a continuing need for safe and cost-effective drugs suitable for use in resource-poor settings.

Professor Fairlamb said that fexinidazole has the potential to become a safe and effective oral drug therapy for treating the severest form of visceral leishmaniasis.

“Visceral leishmaniasis is a neglected disease of poverty which causes huge problems across Africa, Asia and Latin America, killing tens of thousands of people every year,” said Professor Fairlamb.

“The current treatments are far from ideal and we need to find better, cheaper and more easily delivered drugs to tackle the disease. Our research suggests that fexinidazole has strong potential to do that.

“Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative have already established that fexinidazole is safe in early clinical trials for African sleeping sickness, so it is some way along the development path.

“This has been a great team effort and I would like to acknowledge the dedication and enthusiasm of the biologists, chemists and pharmacologists involved in this discovery.”

Professor Fairlamb and colleagues are based in the College of Life Sciences at Dundee, which houses the Drug Discovery Unit, formed in 2005 specifically to fill the void of research and development of drug targets for diseases of poverty like African sleeping sickness, leishmaniasis, and Chagas’ disease that afflict the developing world.

Professor Fairlamb cited the inspiration of the University’s former Chancellor, the Nobel prize-winning pharmacologist Sir James Black, in carrying out the research on fexinidazole.

“Sir James always liked to remind me that `the most fruitful basis for the discovery of a new drug is to start with an old drug’. This adage is particularly apt in the search for effective drugs to treat neglected tropical diseases such as visceral leishmaniasis,” said Professor Fairlamb. “Indeed, two of the existing anti-leishmanial drugs, miltefosine and amphotericin B, are examples of medicines originally developed for other purposes – anti-cancer and anti-fungal, respectively.

“Our hope is that fexinidazole can follow them and provide relief from a disease that is a major blight across the world.”

**

The University of Dundee is renowned for its academic contributions to tropical disease research. Many disciplines towards the discovery of new therapies for tropical diseases are combined, with 76 scientists working in and collaborating with the Drug Discovery Unit.

The Drug Discovery Unit (http://www.drugdiscovery.dundee.ac.uk) within the College of Life Sciences at Dundee has been created to respond to a lack of capacity in the UK for early stage drug discovery in the academic sector. The DDU’s aim is to translate basic science into lead compounds to validate putative drug targets, to use as tools to investigate disease pathways and, when appropriate, advance to pre-clinical drug candidates.

To get a glimpse of what tomorrow’s young global managers might be like as leaders, take a look at how today’s young people think about communications.

For one thing, they are devoted to connectivity. In a recent survey of more than 2,800 college students and young professionals in 14 countries, Cisco found [...]]]> From HBR

To get a glimpse of what tomorrow’s young global managers might be like as leaders, take a look at how today’s young people think about communications.

For one thing, they are devoted to connectivity. In a recent survey of more than 2,800 college students and young professionals in 14 countries, Cisco found that more than half said they could not live without the internet, and if forced to choose, two-thirds would opt to have an internet rather than a car. This intense desire to be connected leads to a demand for greater flexibility: Two out of five people said they’d accept a lower-paying job if the position offered greater flexibility on access to social media, the ability to work from where they chose, and choice on the mobile devices they could use on the job. Tomorrow’s young managers will share these attitudes, and workplaces will inevitably become more flexible.

For another thing, social media is quickly overtaking phones and email and becoming the dominant form of communication. Young people are driving this change, with the one-to-one mode of interacting giving way to a one-to-many mind-set. Young leaders will use social media to create a running dialog with their employees and colleagues, issuing constant updates about their projects and ideas. Employees will use it to provide instantaneous input and feedback. Workers, via this medium, will insist on having a voice in shaping the company’s vision and strategy.

The demand for increased connectivity and flexibility and greater use of social media will shape and change companies from the inside out. Companies will need to think hard about these questions:

• What is the appropriate level of openness? Should employees be prevented from slamming their bosses’ ideas, for example? Should managers be restricted in the kinds of things they can say to or about employees?

• How much blurring of public and private life is too much? Social media encourages people to mix work- and nonwork-related communication, but some workers prefer to keep their social lives strictly off-limits.

• How can the company prevent abuse of social media? Things can get ugly quickly — all it takes is one thoughtless comment. Employees and managers need to know that there will be serious consequences for any misuse of this potentially combustible form of communication.

• When employees from VPs to interns are sharing company information on Twitter, on Facebook, and in blogs while your competition is watching, how do you ensure that your employees understand what information is confidential and what is public?

As companies resolve these issues, management styles will evolve. The days when a leader can confidently say “I know best” will come to an end. Managers will no longer be able to communicate with just a small circle of trusted advisers — they’ll be expected to interact digitally with a much broader range of people both inside and outside the company.

Not every company will be pleased by this turn of events, of course, but those that embrace it will have new competitive opportunities. With knowledge flowing more freely throughout the organization and decisions being made more quickly, the company will be able to react more nimbly to the ever-increasing pace of change.

This post is part of the HBR Insight Center, The Next Generation of Global Leaders.

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But before you get too excited, they also put these numbers into perspective by comparing the total number of Facebook users to the total populations of African countries. When you look at these [...]]]> The fine folks over at oAfrica have complied the Facebook growth rates for the last 18 months and they are stunning.

But before you get too excited, they also put these numbers into perspective by comparing the total number of Facebook users to the total populations of African countries. When you look at these numbers, FB’s growth is great, but still quite lacking in mass adoption. Here are some highlights worthy of a raised eyebrow:

18 month user growth rate in selected countries

• Nigeria 154% increase to 4,369,740 FB users
• Ghana 85% increase to 1,146,560 FB users
• Kenya 50% increase to 1,298,560 users

.

Facebook adoption across Africa

• 37+ million Facebook users as of December 2011
• 165% median Facebook user growth since July 2010 (114% mean)

.

Penetration rates across Africa

• 2.4% median Facebook penetration rate (3.6% mean)
• 36 nations have fewer than 1-in-20 people on Facebook
• 12 nations have fewer than 1-in-100 people on Facebook

.

Another way to look at this is that with Nigeria’s growth at 150,000 new Facebook users ever month, it would take 4 years to reach everyone in Nigeria, if the 154% growth rate remains the same. But it will probably slow dramatically as oAfrica projects:

Facebook adoption in Africa, although rapidly increasing within most nations at the moment, is starting to slow in more developmentally-advanced countries. Even if Facebook user growth rates settle at 25% annually, it could be ten years until Kenya boasts 30% of the population on Facebook. In 17 months, Kenya’s Facebook user rate has gone from 2% to 3%. South Africa’s is near 10% after increasing from 7%. This growth rate of 50% over 17 months for Kenya and South Africa – which we deem “mature” – suggests the challenges large nations face providing affordable Internet and connecting rural areas. Plus, even when Internet access is available, not everyone wants to use Facebook.

What to make of this all? Facebook is a growing presence in Africa and it is an online juggernaut. But African countries have a long way to go before all their people can get online and enjoy the FB experience.

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Desmond Lun, an associate professor of computer science, has received $36,589 from a Lockheed Martin contract administered by the National Institutes of Health for his work with GRANITE (Genetic Regulatory Analysis of [...]]]> CAMDEN — A Rutgers–Camden professor is using his expertise in computer science to aid in the development of new methods to fight tuberculosis.

Desmond Lun, an associate professor of computer science, has received $36,589 from a Lockheed Martin contract administered by the National Institutes of Health for his work with GRANITE (Genetic Regulatory Analysis of Networks Investigational Tool Environment), a software platform designed to simulate the behavior of living cells.

The role of Lun’s lab in the funded project is to use the GRANITE program to make predictions about the behavior of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes tuberculosis.

Tuberculosis bacteria usually attack the lungs, but also can attack other parts of the body such as the kidneys, spine, and brain. If not treated properly, tuberculosis can be fatal, according to the Centers for Disease Control and prevention.

“There are drugs that fight tuberculosis, but as is often the case with bacterial diseases, it develops immunities to these drugs,” Lun says. “There’s quite a search going on for new drugs and researchers are now looking at an area of the organism known as central metabolism. We want to disrupt the process of how the organism takes the nutrients of its environment, breaks them down, and uses them to grow.”

Lun is using the GRANITE program, developed by defense contractor Lockheed Martin under the auspices of the Office of Cyber Infrastructure and Computational Biology at NIAID/NIH, to simulate disruption of the bacteria’s metabolism.

“We’re looking for things that may kill the organism,” he says.

The computer simulation can give researchers answers and new insight into the process much faster than it would take to grow a tuberculosis bacteria culture and test various ways to disrupt its metabolism.

“Doing these experiments is very difficult and you want to test potential targets quickly, which isn’t possible,” Lun says. “Tuberculosis is a very slow-growing organism. It takes weeks to months to grow a culture, so if you want to test a genetic change, then that’s the timeframe you’re looking at. By using a computer simulation, you can pick out, say, the 10 most promising ways out of 100 to alter the organism. That saves a lot of time and money.”

Lun, who has also researched how to alter the genetic makeup of E. coli to produce biodiesel fuel derived from fatty acids, says predicting how an organism behaves with a computer simulation can also be applied to other microbes.

The tuberculosis research is part of a much larger endeavor to capture the rules that govern how biological systems behave.

“This is only the first step,” Lun says. “Who knows where it will go? It’s a very exciting project to be a part of.”

Recently, Apple released its 4th quarter earnings, and the numbers were stunning. Macrumors spells out the highlights of what is now the most valuable public company on earth:

Apple shipped 5.2 million Macintosh computers during the quarter, a unit increase of 26 percent over the year-ago quarter. Quarterly iPhone unit sales reached 37.04 [...]]]>

Recently, Apple released its 4th quarter earnings, and the numbers were stunning. Macrumors spells out the highlights of what is now the most valuable public company on earth:

Apple shipped 5.2 million Macintosh computers during the quarter, a unit increase of 26 percent over the year-ago quarter. Quarterly iPhone unit sales reached 37.04 million, up 128 percent from the year-ago quarter… Apple also sold 15.43 million iPads during the quarter, up 111 percent over the year-ago quarter. Apple set new company records for iPhone, iPad, and Mac sales during the quarter.

But all those numbers are pretty abstract. Can you even fathom a company where:

1. The iTunes Store alone generated 50 percent more revenue than all of Yahoo did last quarter
2. Apple’s profit for the year beats Google’s total revenue for the year
3. Apple’s quarterly revenues are over double Microsoft’s quarterly revenues

I have a pretty good imagination, and I am still trying to comprehend what all that means. But there is one small metric that is no dream. Its a metric that should have every IT company concerned too:

Apple sold more iPads alone than HP sold PC’s

Oh, and iPads are only 20% of Apple’s overall revenue stream. Which means that every IT company in America, Africa, and around the world will need to have an iPad strategy in 2012. No more is the PC – desktop or laptop – the center of the computing experience. The iPhone (and to a lesser extent) Android own the mobile phone space and the iPad is now cannibalizing the PC market as people find the sleek aluminum and glass tablet more convenient and powerful than many computers.

iPads are in Africa already

I can hear a few people in the ICT4D space saying “so what?” They believe that iPads are not Bottom of the Pyramid products. To an extent, they are right – most Africans are not buying iPads as consumer items, like is done in wealthy countries. Yet, iPads are here, and cheaper than in Europe.

IDG reports that IT and business professionals in Africa are twice as likely (47%) to use an iPad purchased by their employer than their colleagues elsewhere in the world (23%), and possibly as a result, iPad users in Africa tended to use their devices more for business than entertainment and their levels of work-based communication using an iPad were higher than average.

But what should be noticed is that levels of hardware substitution in Africa are very close to the global norm. 73% said their iPad had partly or completely replaced their laptop. That means desktop and laptop vendors need to develop an iPad strategy now.

Not a tablet strategy, mind you, but an iPad strategy. So far, its the only tablet that matters as IDG found “incredible” brand loyalty to Apple – only 19% of those surveyed in Africa would consider purchasing a non-Apple tablet. And iPad users are popping everywhere, even in rural agriculture.

Question is: what does an iPad strategy look like?

This is an open question. I’ve explored the iPad’s impact on education, but as to an iPad sales strategy, I’m still a bit lost. I do know we all need to find one asap. Or we will all be working in a Genius Bar before we know it.

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