MSU research team awarded $9.1 million to battle malaria in Malawi

In the African country of Malawi, more than four million of the nation's thirteen million citizens contract malaria every year. Most of those are children and many of them end up as part of the approximately one million children in sub-Saharan Africa who die of malaria every year. Michigan State University professor of internal medicine Terrie Taylor wants to put a stop to that.

Luckily for her, she's getting the funding to do just that.

This week the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases awarded Dr. Taylor and her colleagues a $9.1 million federal grant to create new prevention and control strategies in the small, landlocked country. The team will help establish a self-sustained research entity capable of implementing and evaluating anti-malaria strategies.

In a press release, Dr. Taylor said, "Successful malaria prevention and elimination activities require sustained, effective and well-targeted interventions." Not only does Dr. Taylor conduct research on malaria, she spends six months each year working at the Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre, Malawi, where she treats malaria patients, who are mostly children.

Many other Michigan State University researchers from the colleges of Osteopathic Medicine and Natural Science as well as Michigan State University's Biomedical Research Informatics Core will take part in the project, which continues Michigan State's involvement in malaria research in Malawi since 1985. Karl Seydel will lead the molecular and genomics work. Ned Walker will research the mosquitos that carry malaria. Jonathan Babbage of the Biomedical Research Informatics Core will provide data management and biostatistical support. Lynn Mande will coordinate the finance management and administration.

Using new molecular and genomic tools in combination with established approaches, Taylor and her team will study patients, malaria parasites, the mosquitoes that infect people with the parasite, and the individuals who carry the parasite and infect mosquitoes but manifest no symptoms themselves. The work will be carried out in three locations in Malawi with different environments that are representative of geographic regions across southern Africa.

Michigan State University is no the only institution involved in the project, which forms part of a newly established National Institutes of Health network of International Centers of Excellence for Malaria Research. Investigators from University of Maryland, University of Michigan, Harvard School of Public Health, and the University of Malawi's College of Medicine will also participate. Furthermore, the proposal was developed with input from Malawi's National Malaria Control Programme, the relevant policy-making body in Malawi.

That coordination, Taylor said, will enable the team to translate "data into policy," ensuring research findings are brought to bear on policy development. She continued, "Malawi, with its political will, track record in malaria research and ecological diversity, has the potential to be a site for transformative research on malaria control, prevention and elimination."