We are a human immunology lab that uses experimental medicine to understand mechanisms of acquired immunity to malaria. Why is this important? Because malaria continues to kill hundreds of thousands of children each year; parasite drug resistance threatens malaria control worldwide; and the only licenced malaria vaccine has low and short-lived efficacy. We need to identify and understand effective strategies of host defense to improve disease control.
To do this we use human challenge models of malaria in which healthy volunteers are infected with malaria parasites in a safe and controlled clinical setting - we then examine their immune response to infection. Next, volunteers are re-infected to ask how their immune response changes the second time they see parasites - this can tell us how immunity minimises the risk of disease.
You see malaria is unusual in that your immune system doesn’t get better at killing parasites but instead learns to live with them and minimise the harm they can cause. And if we can understand how this works then we could design and implement control strategies that specifically target severe disease to stop children dying from malaria.
You can find out more about human challenge models of malaria here:
This video was developed by our friends and collaborators at the University of Oxford. They are amazing and you can check them out at https://draperlab.web.ox.ac.uk/home