Gates Foundation Funds Novel Malaria Studies At UC San Diego

Main Category: Tropical Diseases
Also Included In: Infectious Diseases / Bacteria / Viruses
Article Date: 21 Oct 2009 - 19:00 PDT

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Funding for two research projects at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine are among the 76 grants announced by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in the third funding round of Grand Challenges Explorations, an initiative to help scientists around the world explore bold and largely unproven ways to improve health in developing countries. The grants were provided to scientists in 16 countries on five continents.

To receive funding, the investigators showed in a two-page application how their ideas fall outside current scientific paradigms and might lead to significant advances in global health. The initiative is highly competitive, receiving almost 3,000 proposals in this round. The two, $100,000 grants to UC San Diego will support novel research at to help develop new weapons in the fight to eradicate malaria.

Malaria, one of the leading causes of death in developing countries, is transmitted by mosquitoes in tropical areas around the globe. Each year, there are approximately 350 to 500 millions cases of malaria, killing close to one million people. Every day, malaria takes the lives of 2,000 children in Africa alone, where the most lethal form of the malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, is found.

The first grant - to post-doctoral researcher Kailash Patra, PhD, Joseph Vinetz, MD, professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Disease, and Philip Felgner, PhD, professor and Director of Protein Microarry Laboratory, University of California, Irvine - will facilitate the search for new P. falciparum transmission-blocking candidates that could be naturally boosted during malaria infection. Such targets would allow development of a vaccine designed to maintain immunity in the human host after a single injection by preventing the development of malaria parasites inside the mosquito. Discovery of a protein that allows an increased protective response after infection would eliminate the need for multiple vaccinations that are neither feasible nor practical in resource-limited countries.

A second grant will provide support for development of a mouse model of human malaria by a multidisciplinary team: Vinetz, Catriona Jamieson, MD, PhD assistant professor of medicine and Director for Stem Cell Research with post-doctoral fellow Jennifer Black, MD, at the UCSD Moores Center, and Inder M. Verma, PhD, Professor, Irwin Mark Jacobs Chair in Exemplary Life Science and American Cancer Society Professor at the Salk Institute. This model will serve as a new tool for evaluating strategies to fight the disease, including testing critically needed new anti-malarial drugs and vaccines as well as testing for long-term toxicity of anti-malarial therapies.

"Our goal is to develop a model for the disease which faithfully reconstitutes the complete life cycle of human-infecting Plasmodium parasites," said Vinetz. "Our approach is unconventional in that we are incorporating human stem cells into the model, and creative because it brings together a disparate group of researchers - a malaria expert with field experience, a stem-cell biologist working in blood disorders, and a molecular biologist who has previously developed other mouse models capable of modeling human infectious diseases."

"The winners of these grants show the bold thinking we need to tackle some of the world's greatest health challenges," said Dr. Tachi Yamada, president of the Gates Foundation's Global Health Program. "I'm excited about their ideas and look forward to seeing some of these exploratory projects turn into life-saving breakthroughs."

Source
Grand Challenges Explorations