Volunteers get bitten for science
People have willingly received mosquito bites to help scientists study a poorly understood stage in malaria’s life cycle.
The parasite that causes malaria, named Plasmodium falciparum, has a life cycle that involves both humans and mosquitoes. Starting in the saliva of female Anopheles mosquitoes, it enters a person’s bloodstream when the insects feed. It then moves to the person’s liver, where it infects liver cells and matures into a stage known as schizonts. The schizonts then divide to form thousands of so-called merozoites, which burst out of the liver cells and into the bloodstream. The merozoites infect red blood cells, producing more schizonts and yet more merozoites, which continue the infection.
To complete its life cycle, the parasite must return to a mosquito. Some of the parasites in the person’s blood transform into male and female cells called gametocytes that are taken up by a mosquito when it feeds on that person. Inside the mosquito, male and female parasites reproduce to create the next generation of parasites. The new parasites then move to the mosquito’s salivary glands, ready to begin another infection. Stopping the parasite being transmitted from humans to mosquitoes will stop the spread of malaria in the population. Yet it has proven difficult to study this part of the life cycle from natural infections.
Here, Reuling et al. report a new method for generating gametocytes in human volunteers that will enable closer study of the biology of malaria transmission. The method is developed using the Controlled Human Malaria Infection (CHMI) model. Healthy volunteers without a history of malaria are bitten by mosquitoes infected with malaria parasites. Shortly afterwards, the volunteers are given a drug treatment to control and reduce their symptoms. The gametocytes form during this phase of the infection. At the end of the experiment, all the volunteers receive a final treatment that completely cures the infection.
Reuling et al. recruited 16 volunteers and assigned them to four groups at random. Each group received a different drug regime. Roughly a week after the mosquito bites, all participants showed malaria parasites in their blood, and between 8.5 and 12 days later, mature gametocytes started to appear. This early appearance suggests that the parasites start to transform into gametocytes when they first emerge from the liver. The experiment also revealed that female gametocytes stay in the blood for a longer period than their male counterparts.
These results are proof of principle for a new way to investigate malaria infection. The new model provides a controlled method for studying P. falciparum gametocytes in people. In the future, it could help to test the impact of drugs and vaccines on gametocytes. Understanding more about these parasites’ biology could lead to treatments that block malaria transmission.
To find out more
Read the eLife research paper on which this eLife digest is based
