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New insights into immune responses to malaria
Advanced technologies have been used to solve a long-standing mystery about why some people develop serious illness when they are infected with the malaria parasite, while others carry the infection asymptomatically.
Dr Lisa Ioannidis (left) and Associate Professor Diana
Hansen (right) have led a study into why some people
develop serious illness as a result of malaria infections.
An international team used mass cytometry – an in-depth way of characterising individual cells – and machine learning to discover ‘immune signatures’ associated with symptomatic or asymptomatic infections in people infected with the Plasmodium vivax parasite. This uncovered an unexpected role for immune T cells in protection against malaria, a finding that could help to improve the development of much-needed malaria vaccines.