Funded by a $1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, scientists at Binghamton University, State University of New York, hope to understand how the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum evolved resistance to the once-effective medication chloroquine.
“Malaria is responsible for 1-3 million deaths a year, most of whom are children under 5 in sub-Saharan Africa,” said J. Koji Lum, associate professor of anthropology and biological sciences, principal investigator for the grant. “This is equivalent to the death toll from the attacks of 9/11 every eight to 24 hours.”
Lum and Ralph Garruto, professor of biomedical anthropology and a co-investigator on the grant, together have about 11,000 archived human blood samples from malarious regions of the Pacific collected from the 1950s to the present. The samples will be analyzed and researchers will document the accumulation of genetic changes that resulted in chloroquine's treatment failure in the Pacific.
Malaria is relatively easy to eliminate in places that have a good health-care infrastructure. In the developing world, particularly in the tropics, the disease is treated primarily through chemotherapy, Lum said.
The problem is that parasites develop resistance to the drugs over time. This study will help scientists understand how malaria parasites evolved resistance to chloroquine. They also hope to learn lessons that may be relevant to current treatments and their interactions with the disease. Ultimately, a better understanding of past episodes of drug resistance evolution will help doctors get the maximum possible impact from newer drugs.