Table 1. The Top Ten Priority Research Areas Identified by DRG4.

Core Themea	Priorityb	Description of Priority
(1)	1	Optimise existing intervention tools to maximise impact (taking into account polyparasitism) and sustainability. The tools include pharmaceuticals, vaccines, vector control, and eco-health approaches (access to clean water and sanitation, improved nutrition, education). Sustainability depends on minimising selection for drug resistance and maintaining community support for adequate coverage and compliance.
	2	Develop novel control tools that will improve impact and sustainability. The tools include new pharmaceuticals, vaccines, vector control methods, and eco-health approaches.
(2)	3	Improve existing/develop novel diagnostic tests, with particular reference to their performance regarding sensitivity, specificity, multiplex capacity, and ability to measure infection intensity/active infection. Sensitivity and specificity are mostly important to enable diagnosis of infection at low prevalence in elimination settings and to confirm cure/absence of particular infection.
	4	Standardise and validate methodologies and protocols for diagnosis in monitoring and evaluation (M&E) settings.
(1, 3)	5	Develop strategies incorporating delivery of multiple and combinations of interventions at various (individual, community, district, national) levels to maximise sustainability of control programmes in general and of integrated control programmes in particular.
(3)	6	Develop strategies (taking gender issues into account) to increase community participation, ownership, and empowerment, as well as equity in access by communities and risk groups to health services.
(4)	7	Develop and refine mathematical models to investigate relationships between infection and morbidities to aid programmes aiming to reduce the burden of disease (elimination of public health problem). Such models need to take into account cumulative effects of chronic disease for evaluation of disease burden and the impact on such burden of control interventions.
	8	Increase use and application of mathematical models to aid M&E, surveillance, elimination efforts, and the design of sampling protocols as well as the monitoring of intervention efficacy, including drug resistance. These models should be linked to economic impact studies of the diseases and cost-effectiveness analyses of the interventions, their combinations, and their alternatives.
(5)	9	Define the determinants and impact of parasite modulation of the host–parasite relationship, including impact on the host response to concurrent infection with other helminth and non-helminth pathogens and to vaccination, and parasite responses, including immune responses to interventions.
	10	Annotate parasite genomes and transcriptomes and develop tools for parasite functional genomics (and other “omics”) in key species.

^aCore themes are (1) control interventions; (2) epidemiology and surveillance; (3) environmental and social ecology; (4) data and modelling; (5) basic (fundamental) biology (see Figure 1).

^bNumbering of the ten top priories does not reflect order of importance; instead, they are organised according to core theme; all the (inter-connected) priorities are to be addressed in parallel as each priority will benefit from accomplishing the others.