The prevalence of Plasmodium vivax has been increasing lately and become an important public health problem in many developing countries. However, research progress in P. vivax malaria has been slow largely due to the lack of suitable culture technology for this parasite. Recently, we have succeeded in developing a simple and reproducible technique for short-term culture of P. vivax parasite for 5-6 cycles and adapting this technique to assess drug resistance in field vivax isolates. Furthermore, we have established culture techniques to maintain relative long-term (> one month) P. vivax culture with gametocyte formation and to obtain synchronous parasite stages from such cultures. These culture techniques are essential for both basic and applied research in the coming post-genomic era of P. vivax malaria. In light of this urgent need, we seek a one-year supplemental support to our existing training program in order to transfer the newly-developed culture techniques to vivax researchers in the world. Because hands-on experience is essential for learning malaria culture techniques, especially for P. vivax, we propose to organize a three-week training workshop at Mahidol University to train 12 international scientists on P. vivax culture technology. Based on our past training experience for at least four international scholars, we feel confident that trainees will master these techniques and in turn can serve as future trainers for the dissemination of the technology. Since malaria culture techniques are essential for the progress in this field, we anticipate that this technology transfer effort will greatly enhance research in vivax malaria. ? ?
Showing the most recent 10 out of 27 publications
