Assessment of Plasmodium Vivax Chloroquine Resistance in Cambodia:

Summary

The investigators propose to leverage the unique infrastructures and expertise of National Centre for Parasitology Entomology and Malaria Control and the Pasteur Institute in Cambodia and combine modern fieldwork, including a mobile laboratory fully equipped for molecular biology and culture experiments, with state-of-the-art genomic analyses to investigate how Plasmodium vivax parasites respond to antimalarial drugs. The investigators will focus on resistance to CQ, the choice treatment for vivax malaria in most endemic countries, for which treatment failures have been reported in Cambodia. The study will address some of the key biological mechanisms limiting the efficiency of drug therapy in P. vivax, including the identification of genetic polymorphisms underlying drug resistance in Cambodian P. vivax. The findings will provide a first unbiased perspective on the mechanisms of drug resistance in P. vivax and have the strong potential to significantly improve malaria control in Southeast Asia.

Timeline

Start

2014-05

Primary completion

2014-12

Completion

2015-03

Publications

• Popovici J, Friedrich LR, Kim S, Bin S, Run V, Lek D, Cannon MV, Menard D, Serre D. Genomic Analyses Reveal the Common Occurrence and Complexity of Plasmodium vivax Relapses in Cambodia. mBio. 2018 Jan 23;9(1):e01888-17. doi: 10.1128/mBio.01888-17.

Drugs

Indications