An investigation into the mysterious inner workings of the malaria parasite has revealed that it survives and proliferates in the human bloodstream thanks in part to a single, crucial chemical that the parasite produces internally. According to scientists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and Stanford Medical School, reporting in the journal PLoS Biology, this insight provides a powerful new tool for discovering drugs to treat malaria, which infects hundreds of millions of people around the world each year and claims about a million lives -- mostly children. The work also gives researchers a hypothetical new vaccine to test: a weakened version of the parasite, which the scientists grew in the test tube.
In this video, study author Joseph DeRisi, PhD, a Howard Hughes Investigator at UCSF and vice-chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, discusses the difficulties in developing malaria vaccines.
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