WEHI to share in US$21 million Gates grant for malaria research

Prof Alan Cowman and his team at The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) are part of an international consortium that has won a US$13 million Grand Challenge in Global Health grant to develop a treatment for malaria.

The Grand Challenges initiative, established by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2003 with a $200 million grant to the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, is designed to achieve scientific breakthroughs against diseases that kill millions of people each year in the world's poorest countries.

"They're called Grand Challenges for a reason," said Cowman at a press conference today, "because the questions we're trying to answer are the hard ones."

Together with his co-grant winners, the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute and the University of Heidelberg, Cowman is investigating how genetically altered parasites can be used to infect human volunteers. The aim is to determine how the human body can develop an immunity to malaria in a similar way to how the altered polio bacteria triggers immunity against polio -- the first step to developing an anti-malaria vaccine.

"We're making parasites that are essentially crippled," said Cowman.

Mosquitoes will then be used to infect US Army volunteers with the 'crippled' parasites at the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in the next three to four years. The team will determine how these volunteers develop immunity to malaria, with the aim of developing a vaccine, Cowman said.

"[The grant] will allow us to conduct clinical trials of genetically crippled parasites for the first time," he said. "We've got a really good chance of getting a step closer to developing a vaccine for malaria."

"My one wish would be to defeat this parasite," Cowman added. "It's an incredibly difficult problem and I'd like to put myself out of a job."

Cowman said that the grant recognises that Melbourne has a proud tradition in terms of malaria research, that it is an area of expertise and that WEHI is internationally recognised in that field.

"It's certainly one of the biggest grants I know of in the malaria area," he said of the Grand Challenges grant.

The US$13 million will be divided between the members of the consortium with a budget that is yet to be determined. However, Cowman said that a reasonable proportion will be directed towards WEHI and he is already looking at hiring extra staff.

Cowman and his team also received a $12,940,270 NHMRC grant, announced yesterday, for their work on malaria and leishmaniasis.

Another grant for WEHI

Meanwhile, WEHI researcher Dr Louis Schofield is part of another research consortium which also won more than US$8 million from the Gates/FNIH funding round.

Working with two Canadian groups and a research team from the Louis Pasteur Institute in Paris, Schofield will develop ways to boost the human immune response to malaria infection. The consortium will investigate ways in which people in developing countries become immune to bacterial and parasitic infections (such as diarrhoea). The aim is to stimulate these immune responses in people to more dangerous pathogens such as malaria.