Charles Mackenzie, a veterinary pathology professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine, said elephantiasis and river blindness primarily impact the region’s impoverished population.

Elephantiasis is a disease carried by mosquitoes. When one lands on a human, it can embed tiny worms underneath the skin, swelling and tightening a person’s arms, legs and torso.

River blindness is caused by the bite of a black fly, which implants worms within the skin that are able to destroy the tissue in and around the eyes.

Both conditions are known as filarial diseases in which the body is infected with parasitic worms.

“There’s probably 160 million people exposed to these diseases,” Mackenzie said.

“They are major diseases of poverty and we tend to hear and know about acute

diseases, things that kill … but there are also these types of diseases that can make your life hell or make you unable to work.”

Mackenzie received the initial funding in January as part of a larger $13 million contribution by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Mackenzie and Benjamin Adu-Addai, a pathology doctoral student, will begin research on campus by building upon an existing drug called flubendazole.

“We’re getting all of the data that is available at this stage,” Mackenzie said.

“We’ll develop a plan that will involve us asking a drug company to reformulate it. That doesn’t commonly happen at (a university).”

Although success has been found by injecting flubendazole, Mackenzie said the process is expensive and time-consuming because the drug must be administered once or twice a year for up to 20 years to destroy the disease.

“Recently, it was just a shot, and that was the problem,” Mackenzie said.

“The optimal way would probably be an oral drug, but we don’t know. We’re not limited to how it might be, we just need to make it available to the world in the right concentration to kill the worm quickly.”

Finding a better way to combat the diseases is a great concern to Adu-Addai.

Originally from Ghana, Adu-Addai said if the breadwinner of the family is stricken with an illness, every individual can be negatively affected.

“There is the issue of disfigurement,” Adu-Addai said. “(People) will stigmatize them. It leads to a life of poverty.”

Adu-Addai said although specific research with the grant has not started, the initial steps involve deciding which animal model to use that would be equivalent with a human being to find the right concentration of drug.

“I was involved with the research by using animal models,” Adu-Addai said.

“Most of the research with humans cannot be done with a human model because of ethics.”

Jason Cody, media and communication manager for MSU, said the initial funding is just the beginning of a larger project for the university.

“This is just one of the many health projects we have going on,” Cody said.

“These social projects can go a long way in saving lives.”