The use of Clinical Trials entailing deliberate infection of healthy human volunteers is recognized as a very useful approach to to improve understanding of how these infections make people sick, how to diagnose these infections, how to prevent them with vaccines and how to treat them with new medications. We have developed a unique clinical trial systems that entails deliberate infection of healthy volunteers with malaria parasites and other organisms (hookworms and Strep A) to improve knowledge of these infections and to test new diagnostics, vaccines and drugs.
A specific interest is using the malaria human challenge model to improve understanding of transmission of parasites from the human host to the mosquito by studying the transmission stage of the malaria parasite, the gametocyte.
