In an effort to accelerate the control of malaria and help eliminate it worldwide, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, today announced approximately $14 million in first-year funding to establish 10 new malaria research centers around the world.
The seven-year awards will establish the International Centers of Excellence for Malaria Research (ICEMRs) in regions where malaria is endemic, including parts of Africa, Asia, the Pacific Islands and Latin America. These regions include some of the focus countries of the President's Malaria Initiative, an effort that since 2005 has worked to fight malaria in the regions most affected by the disease. Infection by malaria-causing parasites results in approximately 240 million cases around the globe annually, and causes more than 850,000 deaths each year. Teams of scientists involved in the ICEMR program will be conducting research in more than 20 countries.
"One of our primary goals with these centers is to fund cutting-edge research in malaria-endemic areas that will keep up with the rapidly changing epidemiology of the disease," says NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci, M.D.
Malaria has been eliminated from many parts of the globe, but 40 percent of the world's population still live in areas where they are at risk for contracting the disease. According to Lee Hall, M.D., Ph.D., chief of the Parasitology and International Programs Branch in NIAID, sustainable and effective malaria control requires research in multiple settings on the complex interactions among the parasite, the mosquito vector, the local ecology and the human host.
"The ICEMR program seeks to address this need by creating a network of multidisciplinary research centers in malaria-endemic settings," Dr. Hall says. "The centers aim to generate critical knowledge, tools and evidence-based strategies to support intervention and control programs by government organizations and health care institutions."
The centers will integrate clinical and field approaches with laboratory-based immunologic, molecular and genomic methods. They will adapt their research to changes in malaria epidemiology and emerging research needs as well as opportunities within the specific regions. Their findings are expected to help inform how new interventions and control strategies are designed and evaluated in the future.
Each center will
Overall, these centers are expected to bring critical infrastructure to these endemic regions and help build training and research capacity to combat malaria worldwide.
The principal investigators selected to establish the ICEMRs are as follows:
For more information on malaria, please visit NIAID's Malaria Web portal at http://www.niaid.nih.gov/topics/malaria/Pages/default.aspx .
NIAID conducts and supports research—at NIH, throughout the United States, and worldwide to study the causes of infectious and immune-mediated diseases, and to develop better means of preventing, diagnosing and treating these illnesses. News releases, fact sheets and other NIAID-related materials are available on the NIAID Web site at http://www.niaid.nih.gov .
The National Institutes of Health (NIH)—The Nation's Medical Research Agency—includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services. It is the primary federal agency for conducting and supporting basic, clinical and translational medical research, and it investigates the causes, treatments and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit http://www.nih.gov .