
Malaria 2014: Advances in Pathophysiology, Biology and Drug Development
Friday, April 25, 2014
With approximately 3.3 billion people (one half of the world’s population) still at risk of contracting malaria, and over 650,000 malaria deaths annually, there is still much work to be done before this disease can be controlled and possibly eradicated. Increased prevention and control measures have led to a 25% worldwide reduction in malaria mortality rates since 2000. However, those living in the poorest countries remain the most vulnerable to malaria, and nearly 90% of all malaria deaths worldwide occur in the sub-Saharan Africa, mostly among children under five years of age infected with the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum. This one-day symposium examines the latest developments in understanding disease processes and the biology of the parasite, and developing antimalarial drugs and candidate vaccines. We will present recent research findings including the pathophysiology and neuropathology of cerebral malaria, the molecular mechanisms of sporozoite invasion in the liver, and the development of novel antimalarial therapies. We will also explore drug resistance to the artemisinin derivatives that are the core components of current drug combination therapies. Join us and our outstanding panel of speakers on World Malaria Day for a very exciting symposium.
Reception to follow.
Registration and Webinar Pricing
Member | $30 |
Student/Postdoc Member | $15 |
Nonmember (Academia) | $65 |
Nonmember (Corporate) | $85 |
Nonmember (Non-profit) | $65 |
Nonmember (Student / Postdoc / Resident / Fellow) | $45 |
The Microbiology & Infectious Diseases Discussion Group is proudly supported by
Mission Partner support for the Frontiers of Science program provided by 
Agenda
* Presentation titles and times are subject to change.
April 25, 2014 | |
8:00 AM | Registration and Continental Breakfast |
8:30 AM | Welcome and Opening Remarks |
Session I. Pathophysiology | |
8:45 AM | Keynote presentation: The Pathogenesis of Fatal Cerebral Malaria: A Few More Pieces of the Puzzle |
9:30 AM | Neuropathology of Experimental Cerebral Malaria |
10:00 AM | Coffee Break |
Session II. Pre-erythrocytic/Liver Stage Biology | |
10:30 AM | Keynote presentation: The Biology of P. vivax as Explored through Genomics |
11:15 AM | Translational Regulation during Stage Transition in the Malaria Parasites |
11:45 PM | The Plasmodium Sporozoite's Journey and Beyond |
12:15 PM | Sporozoite Stages in the Liver: Development of Novel Therapies against Malaria |
12:45 PM | Lunch Break and Poster Session |
Session III. Drug Resistance and Drug Development | |
1:45 PM | Keynote presentation: Artemisinin-Resistant Malaria in Southeast Asia: A Tale of Patients, Parasites and a "Propeller" |
2:30 PM | Targeting New Pathways in Plasmodium to Eliminate Malaria |
3:00 PM | The Molecular Basis of Antifolate Resistance |
3:30 PM | Coffee Break |
4:00 PM | Antimalarial Drug Resistance in Africa |
4:30 PM | Malaria Equilibrative Nucleoside Transporters: A Potential Path to Novel Anti-Malarial Drugs |
5:00 PM | Generation of Humanized Mouse Models for Malaria |
5:30 PM | Presentation of ‘Best Poster’ Awards and Closing Remarks Networking Reception |
6:30 PM | Close |
Speakers
Organizers
Johanna P. Daily, MD, MS
Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Johanna P. Daily, MD, MS is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and an infectious disease trained physician who conducts field and laboratory based studies of Plasmodium falciparum to understand pathogenesis. She attended SUNY-Syracuse Medical College and trained at NEMC and BWH in Boston and was an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School prior to Einstein. Her laboratory studies parasite and host biology associated with malarial disease outcomes using transcriptomic and metabolomic approaches to provide novel insights into disease mechanisms. Long term goals are to characterize host/pathogen factors related to parasite virulence and transmission as targets of intervention.
David A. Fidock, PhD
Columbia University Medical Center
Dr. Fidock is a Professor of Microbiology and Immunology and of Medical Sciences (in Medicine) in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Columbia University Medical Center in northern Manhattan. He is also the Director of the Graduate Training Program in Microbiology, Immunology and Infection at Columbia University. Previously he was a faculty member at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Dr. Fidock completed his postdoctoral studies at the University of California at Irvine and in the Laboratory of Parasitic Diseases at the NIH. He obtained his PhD at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and his Bachelor of Sciences with Honors in Mathematics and Genetics at Adelaide University in South Australia. As of February 2014, Dr. Fidock has coauthored over 125 Pubmed-indexed papers on Plasmodium and written 6 book chapters. His laboratory specializes in the genetic and molecular analysis of mechanisms of drug resistance in the human malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum and in elucidating antimalarial drug modes of action.
Jennifer S. Henry, PhD
The New York Academy of Sciences
Keynote Speakers
Jane M. Carlton, PhD
New York University
Dr. Carlton is Director of the Center for Genomics and Systems Biology, and Professor in the Department of Biology at New York University. She received her PhD in Genetics at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and has worked at several scientific institutions in the United States, including NCBI at the National Institutes of Health, and The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR). Dr. Carlton is passionate about genomics and its power to revolutionize the study of parasites. Her research involves using the tools of comparative genomics (bioinformatics, genetics/genomics, evolution and molecular biology) to study the biology of the malaria parasite, as well as the sexually transmitted pathogen Trichomonas vaginalis. She has a keen interest in global public health through her collaborations with scientists in India, and is Program Director of a seven-year NIH International Center of Excellence in Malaria Research with Indian colleagues. She received the American Society of Parasitologists’ Stoll-Stunkard Memorial Award in 2010, was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2012, and has published more than 100 research articles and reviews. Professor Carlton’s ultimate goal is to cultivate and expand the science and use of genomics to study parasites.
Rick M. Fairhurst, MD, PhD
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, NIH
Dr Fairhurst received his MD and PhD (molecular biology) degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Following an internal medicine residency and an infectious diseases fellowship at UCLA Medical Center, he joined the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in 2001. As a clinical tenure-track investigator in the Laboratory of Malaria and Vector Research, Dr Fairhurst focuses his laboratory’s work on elucidating the mechanisms of genetic resistance and acquired immunity to malaria in Africa, and parasite resistance to artemisinin-based combination therapies in Southeast Asia. He travels frequently to malaria-endemic areas of Mali and Cambodia, where his trainees and colleagues enroll patients into clinical research protocols and use bio-specimens in on-site laboratory investigations. Dr Fairhurst is past president of the American Committee on Molecular, Cellular and Immunoparasitology, a subcommittee of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH), and director of the National Institutes of Health MD–PhD Partnership Training Program. He has received the NIAID Outstanding Mentor of the Year Award (2011) and the ASTMH Bailey K. Ashford Medal for distinguished work in tropical medicine (2013).
Terrie E. Taylor, DO
Michigan State University
Dr. Terrie Taylor is a University Distinguished Professor in the College of Osteopathic Medicine at Michigan State University. She has been dividing her time between Michigan (July - December) and Malawi (January-June) since 1987. Together with Prof. Malcolm Molyneux, she has been involved in an ongoing research effort to understand the pathogenesis of fatal malaria in Malawian children. This effort has included bedside observations, autopsies and, most recently, neuro-imaging via MRI. Over 300 medical students from Michigan State have enjoyed clinical electives under Dr. Taylor's supervision in Malawi since 1987.
Speakers
Myles Akabas, MD, PhD
Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Myles H. Akabas, M.D., Ph.D. is a Professor of Physiology and Biophysics, Neuroscience and Medicine and Director of the Medical Scientist Training Program at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He received his BA in Physics from Cornell University and his MD-PhD from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He completed an Internal Medicine residency and Nephrology fellowship at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. He was appointed Assistant Professor of Medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He received a Klingenstein Fellowship in Neuroscience, an Established Investigator Award from the New York City Affiliate of the American Heart Association and the Paul F. Cranefield Award of Scientific Merit from the Society of General Physiologists. In 2000 he was recruited back to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and became MSTP Director in 2004. He is the recipient of the LaDonne Schulman Award for Excellence in Teaching from the graduate students of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Dr. Akabas’s research interests focus on the physiology of ion channels and membrane transporters. His recent work has focused on the structure and function of purine transporters in malaria parasites.
Purnima Bhanot, PhD
UMDNJ - New Jersey Medical School
Purnima Bhanot is an Associate Professor in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at the Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. She received a Bachelor of Arts in biochemistry from Mount Holyoke College and a Ph.D in molecular biology and genetics from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She continued her research training in malaria as a postdoctoral fellow at the New York University School of Medicine. She received postdoctoral fellowships from the Irvington Institute of Immunology and the Life Sciences Research Foundation. Her current research focuses on signalling pathways of Plasmodium’s pre-erythrocytic stages. She has identified the role of cGMP signalling in the parasite’s infection of the liver and its subsequent intra-hepatic development. Her research is supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense and the American Heart Association.
Liwang Cui, PhD
Pennsylvania State University
Liwang Cui is a Professor at the Department of Entomology, Pennsylvania State University. He received his BS degree in Plant Protection from Shenyang Agricultural University (1984), a PhD in microbial control from the Moldova Agricultural University (1991), a PhD in molecular virology from University of Kentucky (1996). He did his postdoctoral training at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in medical entomology and parasitology (1997-2000). He teaches courses in vector-borne diseases and parasitology. His research interests focus on malaria, including developmental biology, epigenetic regulation of gene expression and mechanisms of drug resistance in malaria parasites. Dr. Cui’s research is mostly funded by the National Institutes of Health and he has co-authored more than 130 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals. He is currently directing an International Center of Excellence in Malaria Research (ICEMR), funded by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIH and conducts malaria research in three Southeast Asian countries.
Mahalia S. Desruisseaux, MD
Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Dr. Mahalia Desruisseaux is an Assistant Professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She received her MD degree at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey, and completed an Internal Medicine residency at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, NY. She came to Einstein in 2003 as a clinical fellow in Infectious Diseases, and has been working on a murine model of cerebral malaria since. She was the first recipient of the IDSA ERF/NFID Colin L Powell Minority Postdoctoral Fellowship in Tropical Disease Research for her work during this fellowship. Dr. Desruisseaux was first to describe an increase in all the components of the endothelin pathway in the mouse model, associated with a decrease in cerebral blood flow. She also demonstrated that mice successfully treated with antimalarials sustain persistent cognitive deficits associated with abnormalities in the microtubule-associated protein tau, a protein which has been linked to the development of Alzheimer's disease. Currently her continuing program is focused on detailing the mechanisms leading to blood brain barrier dysfunction and to persistent cognitive deficits in the experimental cerebral malaria model.
Laura Kirkman, MD
Weill Cornell Medical College
Laura Kirkman is currently an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Weill Cornell Medical College and with a secondary appointment in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology. After graduating from Swarthmore College, she became interested in parasitology while working in the laboratory of Thomas Wellems. There she was introduced to molecular parasitology and fieldwork on P. falciparum working both at NIAID and in Bamako, Mali. She attended Medical School at Albert Einstein College of Medicine where she spent a year as a HHMI student fellow studying T. gondii in the labs of Drs. Kami Kim and Louis Weiss. She completed her medical training at Yale New Haven Hospital and Infectious Disease Fellowship at NYP/Weill Cornell Medical College. After fellowship, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Kirk Deitsch investigating DNA repair in the malaria parasite. Now as a member of the faculty, Dr. Kirkman focuses her laboratory studies on malaria and the tick born pathogen Babesia. In addition, she continues her clinical work and serves as the Associate Program Director of the Infectious Diseases fellowship. She is funded by the NIH, a 2013 WCMC CTSC seed award, and the William Randolph Hearst Foundation.
Miriam K. Laufer, MD, MPH
University of Maryland School of Medicine
Dr. Laufer is a pediatric infectious disease specialist, with a primary research interest in malaria. She has conducted research, clinical care and professional education in several developing countries, but has dedicated the past decade to working in Malawi. She currently serves as Principal Investigator for two NIAID-funded clinical trials being conducted in Blantyre, Malawi as well as the project leader for the clinical epidemiology portion of Malawi’s International Center for Excellence in Malaria Research. Her research studies focus on malaria epidemiology in various transmission settings throughout Malawi, malaria during pregnancy and its impact on infants, and the interaction between HIV and malaria. Her laboratory at the University of Maryland explores the application of molecular epidemiology tools to address critical issues related to malaria pathogenesis, disease burden and drug resistance.
Marcus Lee, PhD
Columbia University
My graduate research, in the laboratory of Dr. Marilyn Anderson at the University of Melbourne, Australia, focused on the folding and evolutionary history of a complex multi-domain proteinase inhibitor that functions as a plant defense protein. My thesis work led me to think more about the fundamental problem of protein folding and traffic within the eukaryotic secretory pathway. In my first postdoctoral training period, with Dr. Randy Schekman at the University of California Berkeley, I probed the molecular basis of vesicle formation from the endoplasmic reticulum, the first step in protein secretion. During this time, I became interested in the fascinating cell biology of the malaria parasite, and joined the lab of Dr. David Fidock, at Columbia University, as an NIH-funded NRSA fellow. My current research has been focused on two areas: to develop a deeper understanding of the basic biology of the parasite, in particular the organization of membrane-trafficking pathways, and to uncover mechanisms of resistance to novel antimalarial compounds that may have uncharacterized targets.
Alexander Ploss, PhD
Princeton University
Alexander Ploss completed his PhD in Immunology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in 2005 and postdoctoral training at the Rockefeller University in New York in 2009. He was a research assistant and later research associate professor at the Center for the Study of Hepatitis C at the Rockefeller University. In 2013 Dr. Ploss moved his lab to Princeton University where he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and a Faculty Affiliated in the Program in Global Health and Health Policy. He is also a member of the Cancer Institute of New Jersey. His research focuses on immune responses and pathogenesis to human infectious diseases, including hepatitis B (HBV) and C viruses (HCV), yellow fever virus, dengue virus and malaria. His group combines tissue engineering, molecular virology/pathogenesis, and animal construction, to create and apply innovative technologies including humanized mouse models for the study and intervention of human hepatotropic infections. In support and recognition of his work he received a Kimberly Lawrence Cancer Research Discovery Fund Award, the Astellas Young Investigator Award of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the Liver Scholar Award of the American Liver Foundation.
Photini Sinnis, MD
Johns Hopkins University
Photini Sinnis is an Associate Professor in the Department of Microbiology & Immunology at Johns Hopkins University. She received her M.D. from Dartmouth Medical School during which time she became interested in medical parasitology. She began her parasitology training in the Woods Hole Biology of Parasitism course and subsequently obtained a Howard Hughes fellowship to work in the laboratory of Dr. Thomas Wellems on malaria genetics. After her medical residency at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, she was a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Victor Nussenzweig, studying the pre-erythrocytic stages of Plasmodium. She started her independent group in the Department of Medical Parasitology at NYU in 1998 and moved to Johns Hopkins in August 2011. Photini’s research focuses on the biology of sporozoites and the liver stages into which they develop. Dr. Sinnis’s work is funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Malaria Vaccine Initiative. She has authored more than 50 papers, has served on NIH scientific review boards, is a Deputy Editor of PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases and on the editorial board of PLoS ONE and Parasitology International. In her free time she likes to teach science to elementary and middle school children.
Sponsors
Promotional Partners
Global Health Technologies Coalition
The PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative
The Microbiology & Infectious Diseases Discussion Group is proudly supported by
Mission Partner support for the Frontiers of Science program provided by 
Abstracts
Keynote Presentation:
The Pathogenesis of Fatal Cerebral Malaria: A Few More Pieces of the Puzzle
Terrie E. Taylor, Michigan State University
Neuropathology of Experimental Cerebral Malaria
Mahalia S. Desruisseaux, Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Keynote Presentation:
The Biology of P. vivax Explored through Genomics
Jane M. Carlton, New York University
Translational Regulation during Stage Transition in the Malaria Parasites
Liwang Cui, PhD, The Pennsylvania State University
The Plasmodium Sporozoite’s Journey and Beyond
Photini Sinnis, MD, Johns Hopkins University
Sporozoite Stages in the Liver: Development of Novel Therapies against Malaria
Purnima Bhanot, UMDNJ - New Jersey Medical School
Keynote Presentation:
Artemisinin-Resistant Malaria in Southeast Asia: A Tale of Patients, Parasites and a "Propeller"
Rick M. Fairhurst, MD, PhD, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, NIH
Targeting New Pathways in Plasmodium to Eliminate Malaria
Marcus Lee, PhD, Columbia University Medical Center
The Molecular Basis of Antifolate Resistance
Laura Kirkman, MD, Weill Cornell Medical College
Antimalarial Drug Resistance in Africa
Miriam K. Laufer, University of Maryland School of Medicine
Malaria Equilibrative Nucleoside Transporters: A Potential Path to Novel Anti-Malarial Drugs
Myles Akabas, MD, Phd, Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Generation of Humanized Mouse Models for Malaria
Alexander Ploss, Princeton University
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