Malari

Scientists reveal molecular secrets of the malaria parasite

In an innovative project with implicationsfor malaria vaccine development, scientists have used genomics,proteomics and gene expression studies to trace how malaria parasitesevolve on a molecular level as they move between their hosts and insectvectors.That focus on the parasites' complex life cycle is helping researchersunderstand when different genes switch on and off as the pathogensmet...

Simple drug has the potential to save many lives threatened by malaria

A simple drug, given to children with severe malaria before they reach hospital, has the potential to save many lives, say researchers in this week's BMJ. C...

Molecular models advance the fight against malaria

Research from Dartmouth Medical School, demonstrating how malaria parasites form mutations that make them stubbornly resistant to drug therapy, may hold the key to a new treatments for a disease that afflicts more than half a billion people worldwide. The scientists developed disease models using yeast and successfully introduced five mutations that make malaria resistant to the anti-malar...

Reducing malarial transmission in Africa

There are 300 million cases of malaria each year worldwide, causing one million deaths. Around 90% of these deaths occur in Africa, mostly in young children. One of the greatest challenges facing Africa in the fight against malaria is drug resistance; resistance to chloroquine (CQ), the cheapest and most widely used antimalarial, is common throughout Africa, and resistance to sulfadoxine-pyrimeth...

Sickle cell and protection against malaria

In this month's issue of the freely available online journal PLoS Medicine, Dr. Thomas N. Williams and colleagues from Kilifi, Kenya, show that the protection against malaria given by carrying the gene for sickle cell haemoglobin may involve the immune system. Studying a group of children and adults in the Kilifi District of coastal Kenya, they found that this protection increased during childhoo...

Chemists synthesize molecule that helps body battle cancers, malaria

The first synthesis of QS-21A, a medicinally important molecule that helps the body battle disease, has been achieved by chemists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In clinical trials, QS-21A has been shown to significantly improve the body's immune response in vaccine therapies against aggressive diseases such as melanoma, breast cancer, small-cell lung cancer, prostate c...

Malaria mechanism revealed

By determining the molecular structure of a protein that enables malaria parasites to invade red blood cells, researchers have uncovered valuable clues for rational antimalarial drug design and vaccine development. The findings are reported in the July 29 issue of the journal Cell. Malaria causes approximately 400 million clinical cases and 2 million deaths annually, with more than 80% of...

Malaria killing a million a year

The prevention and treatment of malaria has made progress since 2000, but an annual death toll of 1 million people presents challenges as the mosquito-borne parasitic disease makes a comeback, the first joint malaria report from the UN World Health Organization (WHO) and UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) says. The report on the disease that claims three times as many African children's lives as...

Gene expands malaria's invasion options

The malaria parasite uses different pathways to invade red blood cells, evading the body's immune system and complicating efforts to create effective vaccines against the disease. A research team led by Australia's Alan F. Cowman, an international research scholar with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, has identified a gene that the parasite uses to switch back and...

University of Nevada, Reno research team discovers hormone that causes malaria mosquito to urinate

Discovery has implications for control of mosquitoes, malaria and West Nile Virus Methoprene, which has the same effect as an insect hormone called juvenile hormone, also sto...

Fighting malaria by manipulating mosquitoes' sense of smell

Combating the spread of malaria by manipulating the mosquitoes' sense of smell is the object of an ambitious research project, led by Vanderbilt University, that has been selected to receive $8.5 million as part of the Grand Challenges to Global Health. The initiative, which was launched by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has just announced the selection of 43 "groundbreaking" resea...

Movie spies on malaria parasite's sneaky behavior

Malaria has been outsmarting the human immune system for centuries. Now, using real-time imaging to track malaria infections in live mice, researchers have discovered one of the parasite's sneakiest tricks--using dead liver cells to cloak and transport itself back into the bloodstream after leaving the liver. Robert Ménard, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) international research s...

Measuring hidden parasites in falciparum malaria

A new technique for measuring hidden malaria parasites and assessing severity of disease is described in a paper published on Aug 23rd in . Researchers led by Professor Nick White from Mahidol University, Thailand, looked at patients with the most dangerous type of malaria, falciparum malaria. Usually the severity of disease is measured by counting the number of parasites in t...

Old drug, new tricks: Prospects for slashing the impact of malaria

A dramatic reduction in the impact of malaria is in prospect with a clinical drug trial to begin in Papua New Guinea early next year. Success in the trial would open the way to relief in the 10% of humanity infected with this debilitating and often fatal disease - over 500,000,000 people. The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research is collaborating with the Papua New Guinea In...

Researchers discover how malaria parasite disperses from red blood cells

Researchers at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development have determined the sequence in which the malaria parasite disperses from the red blood cells it infects. The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development is one of the Institutes comprising the National Institutes of Health. "This discover...

Mosquitoes are more attracted to individuals infected with malaria

Malaria remains a devastating problem in Africa and understanding the factors affecting its transmission remains a crucial part of the effort to combat the disease. A new study published in the premier open access journal PLoS Biology conducted in Western Kenya by Jacob Koella and colleagues now reveals that mosquitoes are more attracted to children with the infectious stages of malaria than to t...

Gene that helps mosquitoes fight off malaria parasite identified

Researchers have identified a gene in mosquitoes that helps the insects to fight off infection by the Plasmodium parasite, which causes malaria in humans. Anopheles mosquitoes transmit the malaria parasite to nearly 550 million people worldwide each year with these cases resulting in more than 2 million deaths annually. The protective gene was identified in a study conducted by a team of investig...

New GM mosquito sexing technique is step towards malaria control, report scientists

Scientists have genetically modified male mosquitoes to express a glowing protein in their gonads, in an advance that allows them to separate the different sexes quickly. Research published online today in Nature...

New malaria vaccine shows promise in early clinical trial

A malaria vaccine remains the most desired tool to combat the worsening malaria epidemic in many developing countries. Pierre Druilhe and colleagues (from the Institut Pasteur in Paris) have completed the first human trial of a vaccine based on MSP3, a protein present on the surface of the malaria parasite, with very encouraging results. As the researchers report in the international ope...

Researchers develop new method to help find deadly malaria parasite's Achilles heel

The most deadly malaria parasite has protein 'wiring' that differs markedly from the cellular circuitry of other higher organisms, a finding which could lead to the development of antimalarial drugs that exploit that difference. Researchers at UCSD have discovered that the single-cell parasite responsible for an estimated 1 million deaths per year worldwide from malaria has protein "wiring" that...

Malaria parasites develop in lymph nodes

In the first quantitative, real-time imaging study of the travels of the malaria parasite Plasmodium through mammalian tissue, researchers at the Pasteur Institute in Paris found the parasites developing in an unexpected place: the lymph nodes. The parasites' presence in the lymph nodes almost certainly has implications for the mammalian immune response, said Robert Ménard, a Howard Hughes...

Warming trend may contribute to malaria's rise

Could global warming be contributing to the resurgence of malaria in the East African Highlands? A widely-cited study published a few years ago said no, but new research by an international team that includes University of Michigan theoretical ecologist Mercedes Pascual finds that, while other factors such as drug and pesticide resistance, changing land use patterns and human migration als...

Scientists develop malaria forecasting tool to predict disease risk

A new tool to predict epidemics of malaria up to five months in advance has been developed by a scientist at the University of Liverpool. The model uses predictions of climate variability to indicate the level of risk of an epidemic up to five months in advance of the peak malaria season ?the earliest point at which predictions have ever been made. The model will assist doctors and health...

Oxidation defense in mosquitoes benefits malaria parasite

Scientists from two universities in Italy and Virginia Tech in the United States have determined the structure of a protein that is responsible for the production xanthurenic acid (XA) in Anopheles gambiae, the malaria carrying mosquitoes. XA plays a key role in the sexual reproduction of the malaria parasite (Plasmodium falciparum) in A. gambiae mosquitoes. Interfering with the formation of XA c...

Malaria, potato famine pathogen share surprising trait

Two wildly different pathogens ?one that infects vegetables, the other infecting humans - essentially use the same protein code to get their disease-causing proteins into the cells of their respective hosts. That's what researchers from Ohio State and Northwestern universities report in a study published in the current issue of the journal PLoS Pathogens. The scientists were surprised to l...

How bad is malaria anemia? It may depend on your genes

Cell and animal studies conducted jointly by scientists at Johns Hopkins, Yale and other institutions have uncovered at least one important contributor to the severe anemia that kills almost half of the 2 million people worldwide who die each year of malaria. The culprit is a protein cells make in response to inflammation called MIF, which appears to suppress red blood cell production in people w...

New treatment for severe malaria

The most dangerous form of malaria is difficult to treat and claims two million lives a year. Now, researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have developed a powerful new weapon against the disease. Severe anaemia, respiratory problems and encephalopathy are common and life-threatening consequences of serious malaria infection. The diseases are caused when the malaria bacteria P.falc...

Malaria vaccine prompts victims' immune system to eliminate parasite from mosquitoes

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health have developed an experimental vaccine that could, theoretically, eliminate malaria from entire geographic regions, by eradicating the malaria parasite from an area's mosquitoes. The vaccine, so far tested only in mice, would prompt the immune system of a person who receives it to eliminate the parasite from the digestive tract of a malaria...

Twenty Years of Malaria Research: Outcomes and Perspectives

The Shoklo Malaria Research Unit (SMRU), Thailand, will be hosting a scientific seminar in Mae Sot on 28 December entitled "Twenty Years of Malaria Research: Outcomes and Perspectives" attended by internationally-renowned experts and featuring talks and debates on a variety of topics related to malaria, from epidemiology to therapeutics and from immunity to socio-economics. As the Shoklo...

Malaria treatment efficacy compromised in certain HIV-positive patients

A weakened immune response resulting from HIV infection can lead to trouble when it comes to treating malaria, according to a new study appearing in the Oct. 1 issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases, now available online. "Our study demonstrates that HIV-1 infected patients with suppressed immunity represent, next to children and pregnant women, an additional vulnerable group for mala...

Malaria may fuel spread of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa

Malaria may be fueling the spread of HIV in areas of sub-Saharan Africa where there is a substantial overlap between the two diseases, while HIV may be playing a role in boosting adult malaria-infection rates in some parts of the region, according to a new study by researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the University of Washington. The findings, published in the Dec. 8...

Global malaria map key weapon in fight against malaria, scientists say

Information on the global burden of malaria remains the subject of "best guesses," and as a result resource allocation for malaria control remains "driven by perceptions and politics, rather than an objective assessment of need," say two prominent malaria researchers in PLoS Medicine. Simon Hay and Robert Snow (Kenya Medical Research Institute and University of Oxford), say that it has bee...

New findings could lead to vaccine for severe malaria

The most severe form of malaria hits pregnant women and children the hardest. A joint study between Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and Makerere University in Uganda has now produced some important findings on how the malaria parasite conceals itself in the placenta. Plasmodium falciparium is the name of by far the most virulent of the four malaria parasites that infect man. It is particul...

Multiple malaria infection inhibits spread of parasite

People who are frequently infected with malaria parasites can develop immunity against the gametocyte, the infectious stage. This immunity inhibits the spread of the parasite. Dutch researcher Mike van der Kolk discovered this during his research into malaria transmission under the inhabitants of Cameroon, Senegal and Indonesia. After just a few infections, people can develop immunity that inhibi...

Researchers discover surprising drug that blocks malaria

Northwestern University researchers have discovered how malaria parasites persuade red blood cells to engulf them -- and how to block the invading parasites. The malaria marauders hack into the red cell's signaling system and steal the molecular equivalent of its password to spring open the door to the cell. But researchers have found that a common blood pressure medication ?propranolol ?jams the...

NT researchers discover breakthrough in malaria treatment

An article published in the prestigious international journal 'The Lancet' by researchers from the Menzies School of Health Research (MSHR) in Darwin has revealed a breakthrough in the battle to treat Malaria ?a disease which effects 40 per cent of the worlds population. There are two major strains of malaria effecting humans, P. vivax and P. falciparum. Although attention focuses on the...

HIV and malaria combine to adversely affect pregnant women and their infants

Malaria is a parasitic disease spread by mosquitoes that kills more than one million people every yea...

Largest synthetic gene ever built offers insights into anti-malarial drug resistance

Researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center say they are moving closer to understanding why the most lethal form of human malaria has become resistant to drug treatment in the past three decades. They have been able to artificially construct, and then express in yeast, a protozoan gene that contributes to such resistance. And it was no small feat. The gene they laboriously constructed...