AMMnet seminar: Principles for Slowing Artemisinin Resistance in Africa

Seminar Overview

Progress in malaria control over the past 25 years has resulted in the per-capita death rate from malaria dropping by a factor of three.  Nevertheless, many challenges remain as malaria still causes 250 millions cases and 600,000 deaths every year, mostly in African children under the age of 5.  The most urgent near-term threat is that of expanding and growing treatment failure numbers — due to the spread of partially artemisinin-resistant (ART-R) parasites and reduced budgets for purchasing ACTs.  High rates of treatment failure from ACTs have been observed in Uganda (about 15%), and it is likely that these will begin appearing in other malaria setting where pfkelch13 mutants are spreading.

In this seminar, Dr. Boni introduces a malaria modeling framework that takes into account all of the recently spreading ART-R genotypes in east Africa, and shows what principles can guide us in slowing down or delaying the spread of pkkelch13 variants and partner-drug resistant parasites. He discusses some country specific results showing what policies are likely to work in Rwanda, Uganda, and Tanzania, countries where pfkelch13 mutants are either established or beginning to spread.

Speaker Bio

Maciej F Boni‘s academic background is in mathematical epidemiology, mathematical population genetics, individual-based disease transmission models, field epidemiology, phylogenetics, and recombination. His main focus areas are drug-resistance mitigation strategies for malaria and the dynamics and evolution of influenza virus in the tropics. His main work in malaria focuses on optimal methods of distributing antimalarial drugs to minimize the risks and slow the spread of drug resistance. Research on respiratory disease transmission in the tropics has included field epidemiology, clinical research, community studies, sequence analysis, and modeling. From 2008 to 2016, Dr. Boni’s research group was based in Ho Chi Minh City, at the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit. From 2016 to 2023, the Boni Lab was based at the Biology Department and the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics (CIDD) at Pennsylvania State University. Since January 2024, the Boni Lab is based at Temple University — in the Department of Biology and the Institute for Genomics and Evolutionary Medicine.

The seminar recording is also available in French and Portuguese.