In Brazil, the considerable human morbidity and mortality caused by accidents with poisoning animals pose high public health, economical and societal costs. Snakebite is a major occupational hazard, and rural subsistent farming communities are the main sufferers from this condition. Bothrops species are responsible for more than 20,000 accidents per year in Brazil, corresponding to 90% of all recorded snakebites. Bothrops spp. envenomation is characterized by prominent local tissue damage, including haemorrhage, necrosis and oedema as well as disturbance in the blood coagulation system. Since 1920's, immunotherapy by anti-venoms is the only efficacious treatment for snakebites accidents approved by WHO (World Health Organization). Yet, it has important limitations and side-effects, including inability to prevent local damage at the snakebite site and anaphylatic shock in some patients. Thus, there is an unmet clinical need to develop novel pharmacological therapies that can counteract snake venoms and/or be used as coadjuvant therapy with anti-venoms. Understanding how the snake venom interfaces with cellular events important for tissue homeostasis is instrumental to inform novel therapies Yet, the molecular and cellular aspects of envenomation are poorly understood. This is in spite of extensive efforts from different labs in Brazil to characterise the biochemical properties of specific toxins and their in vivo consequences in animal models. The aim of the current Research Partnership from the Newton Fund/CONFAP is to (i) set up and optimise a screen to identify likely therapeutic candidates to facilitate cellular response to injury by Bothrops venom and (ii) develop novel techniques suitable to dissect mechanisms of snake envenomation. Driven by unique strengths of the co-applicants in venom biochemistry and cellular signalling, this proposal will identify leads for drug development with important clinical implications for treatment of envenomation patients.

The UN Convention on Biological Diversity promotes using an ecosystems approach (EA) to support the delivery of ecosystem services and benefits (ESB) as a dynamic conceptualisation of environmental quality. It is promoted as enabling an easier integration of environmental goods and services into economic processes and policies. However, many researchers suggest that an EA is 'science in the making' and emerging policy initiatives overlook complexities that stem from both uncertain scientific underpinnings and socio-economic divisions. These include gender divisions and inequalities, yet these topics are largely absent from ESB discussions. While feminist writers (and others) suggest caution with adopting an EA, ADEPT seeks to explore if and how the approach could be useful for promoting wellbeing for women and men. While environmental justice scholars have long suggested that socio-economic hardship and the distribution of environmental goods and bads are correlated, recent applications of intersectional theory suggest that practical experiences of exclusion from opportunity always intermesh with other divisions such as those based on race, social class, disability status, sexuality, age and geographical location. There is then a need to address environmental and socio-economic vulnerability in an integrated manner. To do so an EA needs to first address a binary exclusion; firstly, there is a need to highlight ways in which ESB frame environmental quality, often affording stronger representation to expert interpretation of how environmental quality is experienced. Secondly, there is need to understand how intersecting vulnerabilities influence access to a range of ESB (with a focus on those linked to urban blue-green space e.g. clean water, flood mitigation and recreational opportunities). The focus of the current research will be a major urban zoning project in Belo Horizonte (BH), which covers a range of land-use types from dense low-income urban districts to rich gated neighbourhoods, protected areas, commercial and industrial districts. This provides an ideal case study area in which to trial and extend understandings of gendered vulnerability to environmental change within local urban contexts. Research to be undertaken will involve identifying socio-economic and environmental vulnerabilities and zones of interaction, exploration of differential experiences of urban ESB and scoping the potential of these as a means to support poverty alleviation in urban transformations. Results from BH will also be discussed within a Sao Paulo (SP) context, through the involvement of field researchers from SP currently involved in a local community engagement project involving the redevelopment of urban water management policies. The research collaboration is organised around a series of four international research workshops. An online research community will support the combination and interrogation of both new and existing data sets and development of new evidence of the processes which underpin urban vulnerability, forming the context within which any resilience solutions would need to be derived.

This proposal has two overarching aims. The first aim is research-driven: we wish to understand the unusual behaviour of a a genome repair pathway termed nucleotide excision repair in two important human pathogens, Trypanosoma brucei (an African trypanosome, which is also an important animal pathogen) and Trypanosoma cruzi (a major parasite in South and Central America). Our rationale for this research is based on previous studies in T. brucei, which have suggested that the nucleotide excision repair machinery that acts to protect the parasite's genome from various forms of damage may have a different composition from what has been described in other organisms, including humans, and that some of the predicted machinery may in fact provide a different (and at the moment unknown) function in the cell. Currently, it is easier and quicker to do genetic experiments in T. brucei than in T. cruzi, and we will pioneer the nucleotide excision repair studies in the former and extend this work to the American trypanosome. In the second aim, we wish to run a residential meeting in Brazil on parasite genome repair and replication, with the purpose of fostering greater long-term links between Brazil and UK researchers in this area.

This international network brings together different global perspectives to critically respond to the current smart city agenda. It is timely and innovative in approach and networks together a key set of academics working in different global contexts. It addresses a gap in current knowledge exchange and seeks to redress the balance of focus from the existing highly urbanised, first-world contexts to concentrate on more marginalised urban communities and people-centred urban change in relation to ICTs. The network activities delivered through a series of workshops will address the topic of the impact of digital marginalisation in the 'Smart City' context and its effect on urban space. It will explore models and tools for urban change within marginalised communities, by investigating and analysing positive and negative initiatives developed through the smart city approach. Within this context of what can be considered sustainable urban development in marginalised communities it aims to question how ICTs contribute to this process. The network will investigate a series of Smart city projects in a series of global contexts to study and understand how marginalised communities can appropriate and benefit from impacts of ICTs within the city. The network works with the framework of Henri Lefebvre's seminal work The Right to the City to consider the role of everyday and people centred agency in urban change. Taking the right to the city, the network questions 'Whose right to the "Smart" City". The current Smart City agenda, championed and promoted by ICT companies such as IBM and global city leaders is problematic, since it adopts a technologically deterministic approach that homogenises urban problems across different economic, political, social and cultural contexts. It tends to focus on ICT solutions to be applied top-down, and therefore, fails to address particular issues related to different types of marginalised communities. The network seeks to counter this approach by exchanging and mapping examples of knowledge of ICTs and marginalised urban contexts to understand how such communities might benefit from ICT driven change and how this might support a 'right to the city'. The network workshops will adopt a case study method and will have an open and discursive ethos. Each workshop will comprise contributions from selected invited guest speakers to represent local areas of expertise and knowledge, activities with early stage and doctoral researchers as well as a field visit with selected local community stakeholders. Early stage researchers will be invited to participate in an open forum session and to contribute to forming the outcomes of the workshop meetings. The concluding symposium event will take place in Plymouth; comprised of a series of focused sessions with presentation of the investigators of all partner universities and of other related work. Guest speakers will also be invited from a range of disciplinary and sectorial backgrounds. This will close with an open forum session to determine crosscutting similarities and differences between the different forms of marginalisation discussed along the partnership, possible guidelines for further research and case studies. Knowledge exchange and the outcomes of the workshops will be documented and shared through a website mapping platform. This will act as a live and open platform to disseminate the work of the network as well as providing a tangible outcome as a mapping of knowledge. This will make the work of the network available to the wider community, and will be supported by an ongoing use of social media (e.g. Twitter) to share work in progress. The network will produce an edited book with contributions from all network partners, as well as a co-authored journal paper. The network website will also be developed from the outset of the project and act as a mode of dissemination of the academic outcomes to a broader audience.

Malaria elimination requires that activities focus on reducing parasite carriage within communities in addition to treating those sick with the disease. However, as malaria transmission levels decrease, it becomes harder to identify individuals who might be carrying parasites using conventional methods (microscopy, rapid diagnostic tests), as many of these infections will be of low density and asymptomatic. Therefore, there is a need for innovative and affordable approaches to identify likely parasite carriers and the areas where they reside. One approach is serological surveillance. A malaria infection will leave an antibody 'footprint' in the serum of the human host that will last longer than the infection itself. Detection of these antibodies is an additional sensitive and specific approach to measure a population's level of exposure to infection. Using antibodies in this way has recently been revitalised by researchers at LSHTM as a method to estimate malaria burden with considerable accuracy. Antibody measures have been shown to correlate with other conventional estimates of malaria burden (entomological, parasitological and clinical). It has also been shown that by evaluating the antibody responses and age of individuals it is possible to recreate the history of exposure to malaria. This facet allows a retrospective examination of the effect of malaria control interventions in a given locality. This work has primarily been conducted in African settings where Plasmodium falciparum is predominant, however a more recent analysis of samples from Para state, Brazil showed the approach was applicable in this setting. Therefore, the aim of this project is to extend this work by assembling the current evidence on sero-epidemiology and antibody dynamics in Latin America and extending this with novel antibody targets and analytical approaches. The expected results of this project are to promote better understanding of the current landscape of sero-surveillance evidence in Latin America and to identify research needs to be addressed in future studies. These studies will be formulated to further strengthen collaboration between participating institutions in developing reliable sero-surveillance methods to estimate species-specific malaria burden in the region, target control methods and ultimately contribute to malaria elimination in the region. This proposal specifically addresses the need for rapid and reliable tools and strategies to measure malaria burden and we believe it will provide considerable information to guide policy makers in Latin America.