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Moo-ving forward in the search for cures for malaria

10 October 2007

A team from the School of Biomedical Sciences has extended their malaria research efforts to learn more about babesiosis, an endemic disease of cattle in Australia and many other countries.

Monash University scientists have found a striking resemblance between human malaria and an infection in cows called babesiosis (or tick fever), which may shed new light on the prevention and treatment of malaria in humans.

Associate Professor Brian Cooke and his team from the School of Biomedical Sciences have extended their malaria research efforts to learn more about babesiosis, an endemic disease of cattle in Australia and many other countries.

The parasite babesia infects and grows inside red blood cells. The disease costs the beef and dairy industries millions of dollars each year in avoidable economic losses.

Using synthetic blood vessels to investigate how babesia-infected red blood cells behave, Dr Cooke's team has shown that babesia parasites cause cow red blood cells to stick to the inner wall of blood vessels in a similar way to malaria.

Malaria is frequently fatal because infected red blood cells adhere to the inside of blood vessels and block blood flow to vital organs such as the brain.
In collaboration with colleagues at The Department of Primary Industries in Queensland and the National University of Singapore, Dr Cooke's team has used cutting-edge imaging technologies to visualise structures on the surface of infected cow red blood cells that make them abnormally sticky. Interestingly, these nanomolecular structures are similar to those that appear on the surface of human red blood cells infected with malaria parasites.

"Studying babesia infections in cattle offers us a huge potential to learn more about precisely how malaria parasites cause disease – and in a much more amenable experimental system than humans," Dr Cooke said.

Dr Cooke's team will now look even more closely at the surface of these infected blood cells, to investigate precisely how Babesia parasites cause disease. They are working to identify the specific genes and proteins involved in this process, since they could represent possible targets for new and urgently required drugs and vaccines.

"With such a similarity between the two diseases, we hope that these findings and our continued work on Babesia will help us to understand and uncover more about how to find an effective vaccine for babesiosis, and also to identify new drugs and vaccines for malaria," Dr Cooke said.

Their recent findings have been published in the international journal Molecular Microbiology and can be downloaded at the Blackwell Synergy website.

Dr Cooke's images are featured on the front cover of Molecular Microbiology.