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Significant achievements MAEMOD

Since 2015, MAEMOD has led, supported or contributed to a number of teaching, training and capacity building initiatives, research projects, public engagement activities, and scientific publications, many of them on-going and with a significant impact on the transmission, control and elimination of tropical diseases. MAEMOD currently has 7 PhD/DPhil students and 2 DPhil candidates at the Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford. Students from the Oxford IHTM MSc course have successfully completed their placements with MAEMOD projects, many of which have culminated in their first academic papers. Since 2015, members of MAEMOD have contributed to 133 publications, 31 of them in 2019 to date.

Group picture of MAEMOD team with flowers in the foreground.
MAEMOD team members join teaching colleagues and participants to the University of Oxford’s 5-day intermediate modelling for infectious diseases course for participants with a basic understanding of infectious disease modelling and an aptitude for the R programming language, held 23-27 Oct 2019, at St Anne’s College.

MAEMOD members make a major curriculum development and teaching contribution to the University of Oxford’s MSc in International Health and Tropical Medicine (IHTM). MAEMOD contributes to course instruction and curriculum development for the Biomedical and Health information MSc and Diploma courses at the Faculty of Tropical Medicine, Mahidol University, Thailand.

MAEMOD’s most recent significant achievements include work in:

Malaria research

  • Developed a multi-species spatially explicit economic-epidemiological model to support an investment case for malaria elimination in the Asia-Pacific region in collaboration with UCSF
  • Developed a bespoke smartphone app for real time malaria surveillance data collection which has been adopted by the Cambodian national malaria control program.
  • Vivax costing and cost-effectiveness – drawing on extensive costing data collected during the IMPROV/OPRA studies, we produced the most extensive findings to date on the costs of vivax malaria to household and facilities, the global costs of vivax malaria and cost-benefit analyses of radical cure.
  • A simple deterministic model that can be used to compare the predicted impact of competing strategies for malaria elimination within minutes. This has a built-in front end designed such that it can be used by policy makers themselves
  • A spatially explicit individual based model, with detailed intervention logistics. This simulation platform can reproduce any intervention at any scale given enough data. There is a quite significant trade-off between the level of detail and the time it takes to offer a recommendation to the NMCPs. This platform has been used to replicate the large TME (targeted malaria elimination) trial in the Thai-Myanmar border. Its within host component is also being developed further to account for intricate PK/PD dynamics of new triple malaria therapies.

Microbiology and non-malaria research

  • Completed a clinical trial on CRP-guided treatment in febrile primary care patients. This was accompanied by 5 additional publications describing other contextual factors relating to the trial (baseline antibiotic prescription in the sites; social science investigations regarding patient and healthcare worker perspectives on CRP testing)
  • In the process of rolling out a large cluster RCT of CRP testing in Vietnam
  • Produced the first of its kind menu of the costs of AMR per antibiotic drug class for LMICs and high-income settings (Antimicrob Resist Infect Control. 2018;7:98. doi: 10.1186/s13756-018- 0384-3)
  • Cost-effectiveness of interventions to improve hand hygiene in healthcare workers in middle income hospital settings (J Hosp Infect. 2018;100(2):165-75. doi: 10.1016/j.jhin.2018.05.007)
  • Completed first longitudinal study of MDR Klebsiella pneumoniae with whole genome sequencing (Front Microbiol. 2018;9:1197. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2018.01197)
  • Proof of concept of using machine learning approach to improve antibiotic prescribing in a resource limited hospital setting (Wellcome Open Res. 2018. doi: 10.1101/367037)
  • First RCT evaluation of selective decontamination strategies in high resistance ICU settings (JAMA. 2018;320(20):2087-98. doi: 10.1001/jama.2018.13765)
  • Detailed analysis of transmission dynamics of MDR Enterobacteriaceae in a Cambodian NICU, combining genomic analysis and mathematical modelling, and the first study to quantify the effects of plasmid transfer on ward-level (bioRxiv. 2018; 436006. doi: https://doi. org/10.1101/436006)
  • Major new collaborations established with key US and European networks working on AMR (with CDC funding)
  • New grant for work on adaptive trial designs in emerging epidemics (NIHR 2018-2021)

Neglected tropical diseases

  • Qualitative study to evaluate the fumigation scheme and address challenges faced by insecticide spraying for the control of dengue fever in Bangkok (Int Health. 2018;10(5):349-55. doi: 10.1093/inthealth/ihy038)
  • Find the optimal algorithm to predict severe dengue based on clinical features and laboratory indicators (BMC Pediatr. 2018;18(1):109. Epub 2018/03/15. doi: 10.1186/s12887-018-1078-y)
  • First model-based analysis of hepatitis E infection dynamics in outbreak settings and vaccination strategies to control hepatitis E infection in emergency and refugee settings (PLoS Negl Trop Dis. 2018;12(9):e0006807. doi: 10.1371/journal.pntd.0006807
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