Malaria Research

Our most recent publication: Plouffe D et al. (2008) In silico activity profiling reveals the mechanism of action of antimalarials discovered in a high-throughput screen. PNAS. [ PUBMED | PNAS ]

Malaria has a significant impact on the health and economic well-being of many people. It is caused by protozoan parasites that infect red blood cells causing fever, chills, anemia and sometimes death. Malaria is spread by mosquitoes and is a health threat to 40% of the world’s population. There is currently no vaccine and drugs are the only therapy for the disease. While the disease was once almost eliminated from many areas of the world, the emergence of drug-resistant parasites and insecticide-resistant mosquitoes has led to a recent increase in the number of cases.

Our laboratory uses systems or integrative biology to develop new therapeutic approaches for the treatment of malaria. The genome sequences of several malaria parasite species have been determined and although we can recognize the location and structure of the most of the approximately 5000 genes, in many cases we do not know what the genes are doing for the parasite and what role the genes play in the parasite’s ability to cause disease. This knowledge gap prevents researchers from making the most informed decisions about which genes are likely to be the best targets for drugs and vaccines.

The malaria parasite spends much of its life within human cells or within mosquitoes, making the study of single genes more difficult and time consuming than for other organisms. Therefore, my laboratory has been developing tools, such as microarrays, that allow the activity of all genes to be studied simultaneously. We are using computational methods to combine this data with other pieces of information about the genome to develop models of what genes are likely to be doing and how the genes may be regulated. If we can find proteins that are critical for the parasite’s survival, development, and pathogenesis, we may be able to find chemicals that target these proteins, leading to new drug and vaccine therapies.