Schistosomiasis and Soil-Transmitted Helminthiases (STHs)
A global research platform with nearly 20,000 Schistosomiasis & STH individual participant records, available for free to any non-profit researcher worldwide.
About Schistosomiasis & STHs
Schistosomiasis & STHs and soil-transmitted helminthiases (STHs) are caused by parasitic worms and affect more than one billion people worldwide, These infections lead to chronic health and developmental problems - including abdominal pain, anaemia, malnutrition and stunted growth in children - as well as less common but serious complications.
The World Health Organization recommends regular mass drug administration to control these infections - praziquantel for schistosomiasis and albendazole or mebendazole for ascariasis, trichuriasis and hookworm. In 2019, approximately 600 million people at risk received treatment, as programmes scaled up towards WHO targets.
Yet this vast public-health effort depends on sustained drug effectiveness. Changes in parasite ecology, host immunity or the emergence of parasites with reduced drug susceptibility could all undermine control efforts. Scientists need a way to detect these processes.
Robust pooled analyses of Individual Participant Data (IPD) let researchers detect subtle patterns in treatment response, investigate subgroup dosing needs, assess side-effect profiles and compare diagnostic methods (including newer molecular assays) that underpin monitoring and treatment evaluation.
What we do
The IDDO schistosomiasis and STHs research theme provides an international collaborative forum that pools and standardises IPD from many treatment studies. By making high-quality, pseudonymised IPD available to researchers and policy makers, the platform aims to answer priority questions and to guide more effective, evidence-based treatment and control strategies for this neglected tropical disease.
we aim to:
Maximise the value of existing data by collating and standardising IPD
we do this by:
Carrying out systematic reviews
Providing a curated, harmonized dataset of nearly 20,000 IPD to Schisto/STH researchers worldwide. Access data
Setting out a co-created research agenda to guide research in the field
Our research agenda
Guided by the IDDO Schistosomiasis & STH Scientific Advisory Committee and invited expert reviewers, the 2021 Schistosomiasis & STH research agenda is a guide to how Schistosomiasis & STH datasets in the IDDO repository could be used to answer priority questions that single studies or aggregate meta-analyses cannot resolve. The agenda encourages global collaborations and reflects research areas highlighted by the community.
Currently, the agenda sets out how harmonised clinical, parasitological and molecular IPD from trials and cohorts could be used to address priority research questions, including:
- explaining variation in treatment responses across geography, time, diagnostics, individuals and regimens;
- determining efficacy and safety in understudied groups (preschool children, pregnant women, people with co-infections);
- advancing methodological standards for individual-level efficacy estimation, diagnostic integration and sample-size design;
- characterising drug safety, tolerability and adherence;
- informing prospective trial design and standard case-record forms to close evidence gaps.
How we work
- The scientific direction of the IDDO schistosomiasis & STHs is led by an independent Scientific Advisory Committee made up of internationally recognised experts in this area.
- An independent IDDO board and the IDDO Secretariat oversee all of IDDO’s activities – find out more about IDDO’s governance
- We encourage data contributors to delegate data access decisions to an independent data access committee, chaired by the World Health Organization Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Disease (WHO TDR) though data contributors can also choose to make decisions on access to their data themselves. Explore the IDDO data access committee
Questions
Email us at info@iddo.org