Conference Agenda

Many parasites have elaborate life cycles with multiple stages and strict host requirements. The biological questions posed by these life cycles are fascinating, but their complexity can be overwhelming and showing every detail sends audiences reaching for their phones. As a result, life cycles are frequently overlooked, even though they are fundamental to questions of why parasites live the way they do, how they adapt to changing environments, and whether we can exploit life cycle traits to eradicate disease.

We aim to answer some of these questions by studying the mosquito stages of the malaria life cycle. To survive in the insect host, malaria parasites must adapt to a radically different physical and immunological environment. They do this by rapidly and irreversibly progressing through distinct morphological forms and significantly altering their metabolic processes. Faced with these extreme changes, the parasite population shrinks dramatically, and the surviving parasites grow very slowly. Somewhat surprisingly, parasites complete their obligate sexual reproduction during this period of stress and parasite death. Recent advancers in our understanding of the biological processes and genetic impacts of mosquito-stage development highlight significant vulnerabilities that can be exploited to disrupt disease transmission. We’ve identified anti-malarial compounds that can be delivered across the mosquito life-stages to directly kill parasites with minimal selection for resistance, and drug-resistant parasites with little or no ability to survive under the metabolic demands of the mosquito stages. We’re also exploring new genetic tools than can be exploit the obligate sexual stages to spread through and modify entire parasite populations.

Surprisingly, we discovered significant gaps in our knowledge of the well-studied malaria parasite life cycle. Being able to fill these gaps is an important benefit of developing new anti-malarial strategies and highlights the practical importance of thoroughly understanding parasite life cycles. While the details of these new anti-parasite strategies are malaria specific, we believe that many other parasite life cycles share these vulnerabilities and can be targeted using similar approaches tailored to specific parasite biology.