Abstract

Severe malaria has a mortality rate of 10-20% despite antimalarial treatment, resulting in about 600,000 deaths every year, mostly children in sub-Saharan Africa. Despite extensive research on treatments to reduce this mortality rate, there are no proven effective treatments which can be added to antimalarials to save lives. One reason for this may be an over-simplified view of the pathogenesis of severe malaria. A second reason may be a lack of specificity in the diagnosis of severe malaria – with many cases actually having an alternative or additional cause of their life-threatening illness. Aubrey Cunnington’s group have used transcriptomics to understand the host-parasite interactions driving malaria pathogenesis, to identify translationally-relevant model systems for pre-clinical testing of adjunctive treatments, and as a novel approach to diagnosis. In this seminar Aubrey will outline key findings from these studies and will explain how they are being translated into the next generation of diagnostic and prognostic tests for malaria.