Tuesday, October 8, 2019

PfEMP1 variants identified in children with severe malaria!


I don't have time to spend on this but I can't wait to read it! 


You can't build drugs to target malaria in large part because of the presence of "var" genes. The "var" stands for variable and it's exactly what you'd think. Messed up, mutated, switched around and hard to target because of this.

This new paper provides a pipeline that integrates sequencing of the parasite with proteomics to the variants expressed, potentially opening the door to focused and targeted therapies. Maybe that's a stretch (if you trust me on the biology stuff, you don't know me very well) but -- at the very least it is a pipeline in the right direction and it works in real infected human samples!

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