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Asked by abtb355 to Cheryl, Christina, Daniel, George, Ivy on 17 Jan 2017.
Question: what kind of problem are you trying ton solve as a scientist
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Cheryl Andisi answered on 17 Jan 2017:
@abtb355
I am trying to understand why some people get very sick with malaria, mostly children while others don’t. To do this, I have to understand what the malaria parasite looks like, how it behaves when it is in our bodies and how our bodies fight it. The results i get from my studies will add information that is available, that other scientists are working on, and together, I hope we can “corner” this malaria parasite by making a vaccine against it.
I particularly work on a protein that the parasite uses to escape from our bodies immunity. When the malaria parasites gets into our red blood cells (rbc), where they live. the cells do not look any different from all other red cells. However, as it continues growing, it starts to change how heavy the rbc is, or how easily it can change shape in order to get into small vessels and supply oxygen, When this happens, it becomes easier for the body scouts- the immune cells to realize that there is a foreigner in the body and destroy that rbc. At this moment, the parasite sends some proteins on the rbc surface that will make it stick to the blood vessels and not circulate like normal rbc. This reduces the chances for these rbcs, infected with malaria to be recognized by the scouts. Unfortunately, this is also thought to be what causes very bad malaria eg when the rbcs infected with parasites stick in your brain vessels, you get cerebral malaria and become unconscious as the vessels become blocked.
What happens is that the parasite is so clever- every time our bodies recognize the surface protein, it will make a ‘mix’ and replace this randomly with another protein so that the parasite is always one step ahead of our bodies defenses.
So far, we now know that even though the parasite has many options to choose from for this protein, we can narrow down their options by giving a vaccine that has many proteins that the parasite is likely to choose from.
The fight is still on!
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George Mochamah answered on 17 Jan 2017:
Sickle cell anaemia is very common along the Coast, western Kenya and around lake Victoria. In spite of that, there is no known better way to treat the disease which causes a lot of pain and lack of blood. However, in Europe, they have been using a drug called hydroxyurea used to treat the illness. We therefore decided to bring the drug to African children to test if it works, before we allow many children with this illness to use it routinely
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