July 29, 2022 was a wonderful evening to celebrate the progress we've made on malaria in the past year. The lab team, families, significant others, and friends gathered at the Murphy's house for toasts, ping pong, dinner, and lots of camaraderie. Congrats to Dr. Dianna Hergott for completing her PhD this year and to PhD candidates Felicia Watson and Caroline Duncombe for obtaining fellowship funding support. Congrats also to faculty member Dr. Melanie Shears for obtaining her first fundable score on an NIH R21 grant! Cheers to the MMDL team of Mariko Seilie, Chris Chavtur, Weston Staubus, and Dr. Ming Chang for a successful CAP inspection and for tremendous progress on numerous clinical trial projects including a local CHMI study, an important clinical trial in sub-Saharan Africa, and an ongoing FDA project. Congrats and thanks to our vaccine production team led by Anya Kalata who has been busy at work producing high-quality DNA vaccines to support our mouse and non-human primate studies. Dr. Rebekah Reynolds was hailed for her leadership of our U01 project, which just had its first major publication in Nature Communications with Dr. Hai-Quan Mao's laboratory at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Reynolds and Sam Mak are also making amazing progress with the UW-based insectary that we share with Dr. Marion Pepper's nearby UW laboratory. Finally, thanks to our newer lab members Dr. Naveen Yadav, Dr. Ken Boey, Shruthi Shankar Raman, Ethan Conrad, and Emily Scott who are all making great contributions to our team. Finally, thanks to Dr. Reynolds as well for teaching us how to sabre champagne bottles in celebration of all of these achievements!
First author Yining Zhu, Dr. Hai-Quan Mao's Laboratory at Johns Hopkins, and the Murphy Laboratory at UW are happy to share that the first manuscript funded by our NIH U01 project to develop a liver-targeted, nanoparticle-based malaria vaccine is now online in Nature Communications (link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-31993-y). This study sought to rationally build a liver-targeted, DNA plasmid-bearing nanoparticle for hepatocyte expression. This type of particle could potentially be used in liver-specific nucleic acid vaccination (work is underway with NIH funding), in gene therapy, and in other applications. Congrats to the entire team for this amazing work -- look for more coming soon!
Our team's new approach to epidemiological testing using Plasmodium 18S rRNA on home-collected, pooled dried blood spots has been accepted for publication in the Malaria Journal. The study by first author Dr. Dianna Hergott is entitled "Feasibility of community at-home dried blood spot collection combined with pooled reverse transcription PCR as a viable and convenient method for malaria epidemiology studies". This approach provides a powerful and cost-effective strategy for assessing Plasmodium infection dynamics and monitoring elimination efforts in a variety of settings. Thanks to the study participants for their generous assistance studying malaria in this manner. Congratulations to Dr. Hergott, Tonny Owalla, Dr. Tom Egwang and the rest of the team members in the Departments of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology and Epidemiology at the University of Washington, at Med Biotech Laboratories in Kampala, and at the study site in eastern Uganda. This is the first publication from this clinical study -- stay tuned for more important findings from this research program about the natural history of asymptomatic Plasmodium infections.
Congratulations to Felicia Watson and Caroline Duncombe for winning a 2022 Population Health Initiative Award / CoMotion Innovation Gap Fund grant for their efforts to develop a reliable, low-dose intradermal dosing device for sporozoite vaccines! Recent findings in our laboratory from Ms. Watson's research have led us to reconsider the best ways to approach intradermal administration and this award will support prototype development and proof-of-concept studies. Thanks also go out to our team's CoMotion Mentor Teddy Johnson and CoMotion Innovation Manager Frieda Chan for their expertise and generous support.
Over 50 scientists from the University of Washington, Seattle Children's Research Institute, the Fred Hutch, local biotechs, and other Seattle area research groups joined forces to celebrate World Malaria Day 2022 at UW's South Lake Union campus on April 25. The day was an opportunity to share important WHO messages about malaria's impact and control measures with the public visiting the SLU campus and to reconnect with fellow researchers. In the two years since COVID-19 started, Seattle area research teams have published over 100 papers on malaria in scientific journals (see linked list). Here's to more great science aimed at curbing this terrible disease!
Monday April 25, 2022 is World Malaria Day. Teams at UW-Medicine, Seattle Children’s Research Institute, PATH, the Institute for Systems Biology, the Gates Foundation, MalariaNoMore, local biotechs, and others are working tirelessly to develop better drugs, vaccines, and diagnostics, to more fully understand severe disease, to use existing public health tools more effectively, and to ensure good governance and ongoing funding commitments across a range of malaria programs.
We hope you'll join us at an informal gathering of our Seattle area malaria researchers on the UW South Lake Union campus (750 Republican, between the E and F buildings weather-permitting) at 3PM for a “Seattle Team Malaria” group photo. Come out and show Seattle how many area researchers spend every working day focused on this incredibly important and burdensome disease. We'll post the event photos here and on Twitter! Links to World Malaria Day 2022 information: - WHO: https://www.who.int/campaigns/world-malaria-day/2022 - Roll Back Malaria Partnership: https://endmalaria.org/worldmalariaday2022 Congratulations to Pathobiology Program graduate student Caroline Duncombe who was selected as a recipient of a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation to support her thesis research in the Murphy Laboratory. Caroline's research is focused on the role of biological sex in vaccine-induced immune responses. We are very grateful to the NSF for supporting our trainees, and we look forward to important and impactful findings emerging from Caroline's research efforts.
Congrats to Dr. Dianna Hergott for successfully defending her PhD thesis today in epidemiology. Her work on low density malaria transmission has shined a light on a very important aspect of malaria and given us new tools and strategies to help combat malaria globally. Cheers from the Murphy Lab and your thesis committee!
Congrats to Pathobiology graduate student Felicia Watson whose paper "Cryopreserved sporozoites with and without the glycolipid adjuvant 7DW8-5 protect in prime-and-trap malaria vaccination" was accepted to the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. This is Felicia's FIRST FIRST-AUTHOR PAPER! Congrats! The paper continues our pre-clinical development of the prime-and-trap vaccine approach. Thanks also to our colleagues at Sanaria and Columbia University for helping to make this work possible. More to come when the manuscript is online!
Dr. Heather Glasgow (former UW Clinical Microbiology Fellow, now Assistant Member and Clinical Microbiologist at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital) worked with our MMDL team to determine if RT-PCR testing for fungal 28S rRNAs could provide the same analytical sensitivity advantages that we have long recognized in malaria diagnostics. See our latest manuscript now published in Molecular Mycology (link - https://academic.oup.com/mmy/advance-article/doi/10.1093/mmy/myab061/6433194?guestAccessKey=61f86b89-c52b-402c-8118-b0c29b520c3c).
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April 2024
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