Maria M. Mota, PhD., a Howard Hughes Medical Institute International Scholar, will be giving an MIT Portugal Program Visiting Scholar Lecture on “Approaching Malaria from the Host Side”. The event will take place at 4pm on Tuesday, August 31, 2010, at the Media Lab (MIT), E14, Room 633. A reception will follow in the Winter Garden, E14, 6th floor.

Summary: There is little doubt that malaria presents a serious health risk and limits the economic growth potential of many countries in tropical Africa and other affected areas around the world. There is also little doubt that other methods of intervention effective against the disease are urgently required. A potential approach to malaria control is to target mechanisms crucial for the development of Plasmodium and/or the pathology caused by its infection. This requires detailed knowledge of the complex host cell-Plasmodium interactions. While hepatocyte-Plasmodium interactions during liver stage constitute an ideal target for prophylactic intervention, the blood stage of infection constitutes the ultimate goal for therapeutic strategies against the disease. The major goal of our laboratory is to identify host factors that contribute to the establishment of a malaria infection (liver stage) and to malaria pathology (blood stage).

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