Malaria mutations beat treatments

Scientists have discovered that the malaria parasite  Plasmodium vivax  is evolving rapidly to adapt to conditions in different geographical locations, in particular to defend itself against widely-used antimalarial drugs. The study, published in  Nature Genetics  today, provides a foundation for using genomic surveillance to guide effective strategies for malaria control and elimination. P. vivax is mainly found in Asia and South America, and 2.5 billion people are at risk of infection worldwide. This species of malaria parasite is notoriously difficult to work with and the new study has created one of the largest genomic data sets of this species to date, which is available to all researchers. These data provide crucial information from which we can start to identify the mechanisms of drug resistance in  P.vivax . Prof Ric Price, Nuffield Department of Medicine - The international team of researchers led by Professor Dominic Kwiatkowski from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at Oxford University, studied the genomes of more than 200 parasite samples from multiple locations across Southeast Asia, identifying the strains carried by each patient and revealing their infection history. Unlike Plasmodium falciparum, its more widely studied cousin , Plasmodium vivax can remain dormant inside a person's liver for years until it emerges, causing a malaria relapse.