Molecular Biomarkers for Malaria

摘要 疟疾仍然是一种主要的传染病，有4亿多新病例， 每年死亡。然而，重要的新努力，包括新药物、疫苗和载体， 控制技术，正在进行中，以减少甚至消除疟疾的健康负担。 这些努力的持续成功将需要新的工具，既要监测进展情况，又要发现 寄生虫种群的变化，因为它响应新的战略。之前的努力已经 至少在局部地区，成功地大幅降低了疟疾感染率， 最终失败。许多因素可能导致这种失败，包括药物的出现。 抗药性寄生虫和通过迁移或 商务旅行。在以前的消灭疟疾运动中， 这些工具可以监测寄生虫的耐药性，或跟踪寄生虫种群的变化， 地理区域。光镜检查和临床症状无特异性 足以区分寄生虫种群。最近，我们在 对寄生虫生物学的理解和研究寄生虫的新工具已经开发出来。超过 在过去的五年里，DNA测序技术使人们能够快速获得新的 遗传数据，使我们能够区分个体寄生虫，识别标记， 常见于具有特定表型的寄生虫，如耐药性，并确定 寄生虫来自不同的地理区域。在本提案中，我们计划利用这一新的 发现用于检测和监测疟疾的相关生物标志物的知识 感染，并将这一发现应用于控制和消除 全球疟疾方案的各个阶段

Abstract Malaria remains a major infectious disease, with over 400 million new cases and 1 million deaths each year. However, important new efforts, including new drugs, vaccines and vector control techniques, are underway to reduce and even eliminate the health burden of malaria. Sustained success in these efforts will require new tools, both to monitor progress and to detect changes in the parasite population as it responds to the new strategies. Previous efforts have succeeded, at least locally, in dramatically lowering the rate of malaria infection, only to falter and ultimately fail. Many factors can contribute to such failure, including the emergence of drug resistant parasites and the importation of new strains of malaria through migration or commercial travel. At the time of the previous malaria eradication campaigns there were no tools that could monitor drug resistance in parasites or track changing parasite populations in a geographic region. Light microscopic examination and clinical symptoms were not specific enough to distinguish parasite populations. More recently, significant advances in our understanding of parasite biology and new tools to study parasites have been developed. Over the past five years, DNA sequencing technology has enabled the rapid acquisition of new genetic data, allowing us to distinguish individual parasites from one another, identify markers common to parasites with particular phenotypes like drug resistance and identify the origin of parasites from different geographic regions. In this proposal, we plan to leverage this new knowledge for the discovery of relevant biomarkers for detection and surveillance of malaria infections and to translate this discovery for application during the control and elimination phases of the Global Malaria Program