How the immune system fights off malaria

Study reveals immune cells that are critical to combating the parasite in early stages of infection. 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 (SMART). "This paves the way to start dissecting how the host human immune system interacts with the pathogen." Chen is one of the senior authors of a paper describing the findings in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , along with Ming Dao, a principal research scientist in MIT's Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE); Subra Suresh, president of Carnegie Mellon University (and a former MIT dean of engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor Emeritus of Engineering); and Peter Preiser, a professor at Nanyang Technology University in Singapore.