WASHINGTON (Dec. 11, 2012) New research, presented this morning at the 54th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Hematology (ASH), has identified important associations between Plasmodium falciparum (Pf) malaria and endemic Burkitt Lymphoma (eBL) that may help researchers identify young children who are more susceptible to eBL.
Unlike previous studies in which malaria infection alone was considered the important factor, this study approached the evolving complexity and heterogeneity of the humoral immune response to Pf as a key component for risk of developing eBL in young children who reside in malaria endemic areas of Equatorial Africa. The circumstances potentially set the stage for the development of serological signatures as biomarkers to better indicate the risk of developing eBL during malaria infection.
The study, titled "Risk of Burkitt Lymphoma Correlates with Breadth and Strength of Antibody Response to Plasmodium falciparum Malaria Stage-Specific Antigens," was authored by Jeffrey Bethony, Ph.D., associate professor in the department of microbiology, immunology, and tropical medicine (MITM) at the George Washington University (GW) School of Medicine and Health Sciences (SMHS), along with Amar Jariwala, M.D., assistant research professor in the department of MITM at GW SMHS, and Maria Candida Vila, graduate student at the GW SMHS Institute for Biomedical Sciences. This research was done in collaboration with Sam Mbulaiteye, M.D., infections and immunoepidemiology branch, division of cancer epidemiology and genetics, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, who spent decades collecting the case and control sera in Ghana, as well as the study design and statistics.
The GW SMHS research team developed, optimized, and standardized an extensive panel of serological tests of recombinant Pf antigens representing several stages of the parasite life-cycle assayed in more than 700 cases and c
|Contact: Lisa Anderson|
George Washington University