NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Friday, February 6, 2015

In 2008, the World Health Organization announced a global effort to eradicate malaria, which kills about 800,000 people every year. As part of that goal, scientists are trying to develop new drugs that target the malaria parasite during the stage when it infects the human liver, which is crucial because some strains of malaria can lie dormant in the liver for several years before flaring up.

A new advance by MIT engineers could aid in those efforts: The researchers have discovered a way to grow liver-like cells from induced pluripotent stem cells. These cells can be infected with several strains of the malaria parasite and respond to existing drugs the same way that mature liver cells taken from human donors do.

Such cells offer a plentiful source for testing potential malaria drugs because they can be made from skin cells. New drugs are badly needed, since some forms of the malaria parasite have become resistant to existing treatments, says Sangeeta Bhatia, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.

“Drug resistance is emerging that we are continually chasing. The thinking behind the call to eradication is that we can’t be chasing resistance and distributing bed nets to protect from mosquitoes forever. Ideally, we would rid ourselves of the pathogen entirely,” says Bhatia, who is also a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES).

These cells, described in the Feb. 5 online issue of Stem Cell Reports, could also allow scientists to test drugs on cells from people with different genetic backgrounds, who may respond differently to malaria infection and treatment.

The paper’s lead author is Shengyong Ng, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Biological Engineering and IMES. Other authors of the paper are former IMES postdoc Robert Schwartz; MIT research scientist Sandra March; IMES research technician Ani Galstian; HST graduate students Nil Gural and Jing Shan; former IMES research technician Mythili Prabhu; and Maria Mota, a researcher at the Instituto de Medicina Molecular in Portugal.