U.S. Embassy in Peru

NAMRU-6-‘s mission is to conduct biomedical research in the field of infectious diseases and global health that is responsive to U.S. Navy requeriments and delivers life saving products including knowledge, technology, and medical materiel that sustain the effectiveness of the uniformed service members through respectful cooperation with our collaborators.

Research Departments

• Bacteriology: Among several projects, the major thrust of the bacterial disease research effort is on diarrheal disease pathogens, including field studies to determine the causes and impacts on diarrhea in military and traveler populations, characterization of virulence factors to aid vaccine development pipelines, and collaborative preclinical evaluations of candidate vaccines against Campylobacter, Entero-toxigenic E. coli, and Shigella. Antibiotic resistance is a growing concern and a priority of our research activity to determine the types of bacteria associated with resistance in hospitals and infections, common resistance profiles, and molecular mechanisms that determine resistance and able to be spread among bacterial pathogens. Our department is also involved in assessing the burden of sexually tramsitted infections among high-risk populations and investigating the bacterial causes of febrile diseases.
• Biomedical Informatics Department (BID) works in the intersection of information and communication technology and military health. The technical assistance provided by BID includes development, testing, monitoring, adoption, and evaluation of hardware and software solutions for the prevention of health threats of military relevance. The wider utility of its products allows BID’s multidisciplinary staff to collaborate with subject-matter experts from partner militaries and civilian communities interested in leveraging their capacity for bio-surveillance, early disease outbreak detection, and disease prevention using informatics and computational tools.
• Virology: Laboratory and field studies are conducted on HIV, dengue fever, dengue hemorrhagic fever, yellow fever, Mayaro fever, oropouche fever, Venezuelan equine encephalitis and hantavirus pulmonary syndrome to understand better their epidemiology, pathogenesis, immunology and virology. Research endeavors include efforts for the development of diagnosis tests. A more recent project was initiated to evaluate candidate dengue virus DNA vaccines.
• Entomology: Laboratory and field studies are focused on discovering and testing technologies that project military personnel in deployed settings. We do this through studying the biology, taxonomy and population dynamics of mosquitoes, sand flies and other insect vectors and their role in pathogen transmission. We maintain a colony of Anopheles darlingi, the most important malaria vector in Amazon for use in malaria vaccine development and testing of novel control measures.
• Parasitology: The Department of Parasitology at NAMRU-6 conducts research in malaria, leishmaniasis, and intestinal parasites in the Americas. With a multidisciplinary approach, Parasitology conducts studies on the epidemiology, diagnosis, treatment and control of parasitic diseases, combining basic and applied research cutting across multiple different disciplines. Research ranges from molecular biology and genetics through epidemiological field studies and vaccine and treatment trials. Department research and collaborations extend across Peru and our neighbor countries, maintaining a strong focus on endemic regions in the Amazon Basin. The parasitology research program is entirely supported by competitive funding, primarily from the United States Department of Defense (DoD) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), among other funding sources. Parasitology has field teams in four sites in Peru: Lima; Bellavista in Piura; Padre Cocha in Iquitos, Loreto; and Delta 1 in Madre de Dios. The Department of Parasitology has multiple laboratories, field stations and study sites across Peru and also collaborations in other locations including Ecuador and Brazil.