Malaria Prevention Possible As Genes Decoded

October 2, 2002
By Tim Friend, USA TODAY

An international team of scientists has achieved a breakthrough that is expected to lead to the prevention and treatment of one of the world's three leading causes of death: malaria.

About malaria

• Kills 2.5 million people and infects 500 million each year worldwide.
  
  
• Occurs in 100 countries, placing 40% of the world's population at risk. About 90% of cases are in tropical regions of Africa.
  
  
• About 95% of deaths are Africans under age 5.
  
  
• Symptoms: fever, chills, drenching sweats, nausea, vomiting, headache.
  

More than 100 scientists from the Malaria Genome Project report Thursday that they have broken the genetic codes for both the mosquito and the parasite responsible for most malaria cases.

Malaria ranks with AIDS and tuberculosis as one of humankind's leading killers. Considered a tropical disease, malaria is spreading to temperate zones, including the USA. Last month, two malaria cases were reported in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and malaria-infested mosquitoes were traced to a swimming pool.


The most common form of malaria is the product of a nefarious partnership between the Anopheles gambiae mosquito and the Plasmodium falciparum parasite. Mosquitoes pick up the parasite by feeding on an infected human host. The parasite lives in the mosquito's gut until the mosquito bites another human.

The Malaria Genome Project, led by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the U.K., builds on ground broken by the Human Genome Project, which has worked out most of the human genetic code over the past decade. A genome is the genetic instruction manual for any organism.

With the human genome in hand, scientists for the first time have the genetic manuals for the three key elements of disease transmission: namely, for the cause of the disease, the transmitter and the human host, says Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health.

"This research gives us a major technological advantage that we didn't have before that opens the door" to developing ways of preventing, diagnosing and treating, Fauci says.

What makes the Malaria Genome Project especially powerful is its scope. Scientists also compared the genomes of the mosquito and fruit fly to study gene function, determined the full genome of a parasite that causes a malaria-like disease in rodents and then compared the genomes of the human and rodent parasites. Finally, scientists discovered which genes are turned on and off during the human parasite's life cycle.

This unprecedented amount of information will narrow searches for new drug targets and should uncover important vulnerabilities in the organisms, Malaria Genome Project director Neil Hall says.

The work on the parasite is published in today's Nature. Work on the mosquito is published Friday in the journal Science. Leading laboratories involved in the project include the Sanger Institute, the Institute for Genomic Research, Rockville, Md., and Stanford University, Stanford, Calif.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2002-10-02-malaria_x.htm