How the immune system fights off malaria
The parasites that cause malaria are exquisitely adapted to the various hosts they infect — so studying the disease in mice doesn’t necessarily reveal information that could lead to drugs effective against human disease.Now, a team led by MIT researchers has developed a strain of mice that mimics many of the features of the human immune system and can be infected with the most common human form of the malaria parasite, known as Plasmodium falciparum. Using this strain, the researchers have already identified a key host defense mechanism, and they believe it should lead to many more useful discoveries.“Human malaria studies have been hampered by a lack of animal models,” says Jianzhu Chen, the Ivan R. Cottrell Professor of Immunology, a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and the lead principal investigator of the Infectious Disease Interdisciplinary Research Group at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology...