WHO WE WORK WITH
MBARARA UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Mbarara, Uganda
With an ongoing collaboration with Epicentre, Mbarara University of Science and Technology, we work to understand the spread of drug resistance and resistance mechanisms in Uganda, a country that contains some of the highest transmission rates in the world. Here, we have 2 projects, 1) to facilitate the surveillance of resistance mutations and 2) to assess the prevalence of copy number variations in genomes from clinically isolated parasites.
This project has been funded by the Minority Health & Health Disparities International Research Training Program (MHIRT) and the UVA Center for Global Health (CGH).
COMPUTATIONAL SYSTEMS BIOLOGY LAB
University of Virginia
In collaboration with Dr. Jason Papin of the Biomedical Engineering Department, we study the parasite's metabolic adaptation to antimalarial pressure. As many antimalarials target metabolic processes, we analyze the metabolic shifts associated with drug treatment and drug resistance through high-throughput 'omics and computational approaches. These approaches allow us to explore antimalarial cross-resistance and identify metabolic weaknesses of resistant parasites for drug design.
This project is funded by the NIH Grant R21AI119881.
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HOUPT LAB
University of Virginia
In collaboration with Dr. Eric Houpt's lab in the Division if Infectious Disease, we developed a suite of TaqMan assays for known resistance markers and compartmentalized them into a single array card (TAC). We included 87 assays for species identification, the detection of P. falciparum mutations associated with chloroquine, atovaquone, pyrimethamine, sulfadoxine, and artemisinin resistance, and neutral single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotyping. This tool provides a comprehensive, accurate, easy-to-perform method to track resistance in malaria-endemic countries. Increasing knowledge about the presence of resistant parasites could impact local treatment recommendations and aid eradication efforts.