After over a decade in steady gains in malaria, the past several years has seen a frustrating stall in progress resulting from challenges arising in every facet of this complex parasite’s life cycle. On the treatment side, the malaria parasite has successfully evolved resistance to every drug that has been deployed to date, and that story has recently repeated itself, first in Asia, and now, alarmingly, in Africa. On the prevention side, while there has been justifiable excitement from the first parasitic vaccine ever licensed, the tremendous genetic diversity of the parasite has made it challenging to make a vaccine that can be effective in all parts of the world and for a long enough duration of time. On the diagnostic front, our current approaches leave the majority of infections undetected, making it difficult to stop this vicious cycle of transmission.
On this past World Malaria Day, in collaboration with Yale School of Public Health, YIGH highlighted a few MalarYalefaculty who are trying to develop novel tools to tackle this complex disease. The Bei and Parikh labs are collaborating on novel methods to more efficiently track drug resistance emergence and spread using captured mosquitoes, while the Bei lab is characterizing the diversity of parasites in field settings to understand how these variations may impact current and future vaccines. The Ben Mamoun lab has identified several promising new drug targets, and the Vinetz lab is focused on tackling the predominant species outside of Africa, Plasmodium vivax.
MalarYale faculty are also targeting the vector. The Fikrig lab is working towards understanding biology at the site of the mosquito bite, and the labs of Trevor Sorrel and John Carlsson are accelerating our understanding of mosquito neurobehavior and olfaction.
Others in MalarYale, such as the McIntosh lab in Anthropologyare taking novel approaches by searching ancient remains for clues on how the parasite evolved, and the Ogbunu lab is using computational biology and experimental approaches to understanding the parasites evolution over space and time.
The diverse MalarYale Faculty network meet monthly to discuss their research and find opportunities to collaborate. Their collaborative network aims to integrate studies of the host, parasite, and vector, both within the institution and with our international partners in Burkina Faso, Senegal, Uganda, Cameroon, Peru, and elsewhere. If you are interested in learning more about this Network, please contact Dr. Sunil Parikh, sunil.parikh@yale.edu, MalarYale Network lead. If you are interested in exploring developing a new YIGH Faculty Network, please contact Dr. Jeremy Schwartz, jeremy.schwartz@yale.edu, Lead of the YIGH Faculty Network Program.