Multi-drug resistance in malaria in combination therapy : assessment of specific markers and development of innovative, rapid and simple diagnostics

General

To assess specific genetic markers for Artemisinin-based combination drugs resistance and the development of innovative, rapid and simple diagnostics.

Specific

To develop and evaluate in disease endemic countries accurate low-tech molecular diagnostic tests for malaria, and evaluate their utility for detecting treatment failure in antimalarial therapy trials.To identify alleles of candidate resistance genes associated with increased transmission success of P. falciparum after ACT treatment in completed clinical trials with endpoints at the gametocyte or infected mosquito level.To conduct ACT treatment trials with transmission endpoints, and measure the impact of resistance-associated alleles of key genes on:
Gametocyte prevalence, density and longevity.Infectiousness of gametocyte-positive treated individuals to mosquitoes.Infectiousness of randomly-selected treated individuals to mosquitoes.
To conduct ACT treatment trials with parasitological and clinical efficacy endpoints including in vitro and in vivo resistant determination test, and measure the abundance of parasites carrying candidate markers among participants with treatment failure (ITM is mostly involved in the work package related to this objective).To develop new low-tech diagnostic tools that are able to demonstrate the presence of mutations conferring drug resistance in the Plasmodium population.To investigate commercial value aspects of the developed tests.To investigate patent application for the developed tests.