Experimental human infections have been a long-standing cornerstone in the development of vaccines and drugs against some of the world’s most important diseases. This is certainly true for malaria – a disease that still kills more than half a million children each year. However, whilst malaria is one of the most feared of human infections, we are fortunate in being able to move beyond basic in vitro or animal models and directly infect human volunteers to study the infection’s course and the effect of interventions against it.
By monitoring the course of a malaria infection in volunteers using PCR and by terminating it before each becomes unwell, such studies are now routinely safely executed. Having such platforms accessible means that ethical imperatives require that such studies be undertaken to test drugs and vaccines under development. The same studies also make it possible to collect materials to investigate a wide range of questions in host-pathogen interaction, ranging from innate and acquired immune response to parasite biology. As such, prospective sampling in the natural host in a setting where a wide array of current biomedical techniques is now available, open up new opportunities to study human malaria while simultaneously undertaking antimalarial drug development.
In this presentation, the exciting advances in translational research in malaria coming from the pioneering human challenges studies being undertaken in Queensland, Australia, will be described, and some of the learnings from exploratory research presented.
About the speaker
Professor James McCarthy is a Senior Scientist at QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, and an Infectious Diseases Physician at Royal Brisbane and Womens Hospital, both in Brisbane, Australia. His clinical and research training were undertaken in Australia, the United Kingdom, at the University of Maryland and the Laboratory for Parasitic Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, before returning to Australia in 1997. A major focus of his research is the development and application of clinical trial systems that entail deliberate infection of human volunteers with malaria parasites by intravenous injection of Plasmodium-infected red blood cells. Volunteers are then studied in the pre-symptomatic period by qPCR to evaluate investigational drugs, vaccines and diagnostics for malaria.
HOST: Professor Jake Baum (jake.baum@imperial.ac.uk)