Molecular biologist Dr Sunita Ghimire Gautam is among 15 women from the developing world, who have been awarded the 2024 UNESCO OWSD Early Career Fellowship.

Each scientist will receive up to US$50,000 to lead research projects and establish research groups at their home institutions in 16 developing countries, according to a press statement issued by the UN body.

“This will maintain an international standard of research and attract scholars from all over the world to collaborate,” reads the statement.

Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC) provides funding for the fellowships.

During the two-year fellowship, the awardees will receive specific training to build on their leadership and management skills and develop connections with various public and private sector partners to potentially convert their research into marketable products or guarantee its impact on a broader scale.

By improving their communication and outreach skills, fellows will also learn to effectively present their research to various audiences, thus attracting new collaborators and potential funders to ensure the sustainability of the research project, it says.

This year’s fellows are working on projects that include using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to find vulnerabilities in Tanzania’s health and energy infrastructures, helping preserve critical oak forests in Guatemala’s mountain ranges, and developing antivenom to combat different kinds of snakebite in Nepal.

Each year, around 2,700 people, mostly children and women from Nepal’s Tarai region, die of snakebites, according to a March 2022 report published in The Lancet, a leading international medical journal.

However, snakebite cases are vastly underreported in the country.

“I am thrilled to have been awarded this year’s UNESCO OWSD Early Career Fellowship,” said Gautam, the principal investigator at the Department of Biomedicine and Translational Research, Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology. “This fellowship will help me continue the research work.”

Gautam’s research project will develop antivenom antibodies to neutralise venom from snakes prevalent in Nepal. Snakebite has remained a neglected tropical disease in many developing countries. In rural Nepal, snakebites mainly affect women, children, and farmers with lower socio-economic status.

Antivenom is the most promising antidote to snake venom. Nepal relies exclusively on imported antivenom, primarily from India, so the treatment is expensive and always in short supply in the country. Variations in the protein composition of venom depending on the habitat of snakes suggest that Indian antivenom is probably not the optimal antidote for venoms from Nepali snakes. Furthermore, no antivenom is available to treat pit viper envenoming in Nepal.

This project will develop antivenom specific to snakes from Nepal to address the major issues of efficacy, cost and supply in treating snakebites in Nepal.

It will produce antivenom by immunising goats with snake venom to generate antibodies. It will partner with Nepali company Shikhar Biotech to produce polyclonal goat antivenom from these antibodies. It will also develop an in vitro snake venom detection kit that will assist in selecting the appropriate antivenom therapy, Gautam said.