Giving Compass' Take:

• Lindsay Kurs at On the Pulse discusses how malaria parasites essentially make a blueprint to infect the liver and how this new research could help prevent infection. 

• A further look into this "blueprint" may lead to new malaria drug, how can funders help support this research? 

• Here's an article on building the roadmap to malaria elimination. 

Within seconds after an infected mosquito bites, the malaria parasite navigates the host skin and blood vessels to invade the liver, where it will stay embedded until thousands of infected cells burst into the bloodstream, launching malaria’s deadly blood-stage infection.

Now, for the first time, a team from Seattle Children’s Research Institute describes how malaria Plasmodium parasites prepare for this journey as they lie in waiting in the mosquito’s salivary glands. Researchers say this knowledge may help identify new strategies to block transmission of the parasite – a critically important step needed for the eradication of malaria, a disease that continues to sicken over 300 million people and kill an estimated 435,000 people worldwide every year.

“Essentially the parasite makes a blueprint of the proteins it needs to infect the liver while still in the mosquito, far in advance of actually making the proteins once in the human,” said Dr. Stefan Kappe, the senior author on the paper published in Nature Communications and a malaria researcher in Seattle Children’s Center for Global Infectious Disease Research. “It’s cool biology that offers new insight into how we might begin to stop the parasite from infecting the liver.”

Read the full article about malaria parasites by Lindsay Kurs at On the Pulse.