In partnership with the Wellcome Innovations Flagship Programme, MORU launched its Critical Care Asia Network project with its first investigators\u2019 meeting on 19-20 Aug in Bangkok. The project will establish an Asian ICU network across 42 ICUs in nine countries and implement a setting-adapted electronic registry.
Two researchers from the Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health were awarded medals by the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene at the 2019 European Congress on Tropical Medicine and International Health. Professor David Warrell was awarded the Sir Patrick Manson Medal, and Dr Samson Kinyanjui the Chalmers Medal.
MORU researchers have found that severe malnutrition is associated with lower exposure to the antimalarial drug lumefantrine in children treated with artemether-lumefantrine, the most common treatment for uncomplicated falciparum malaria. The study, which is the first to specifically address this, calls urgently for further research into optimised dosing regimens for undernourished children.
A rapidly evolving multi-drug resistant lineage of P. falciparum malaria parasites continues to spread in South East Asia, leading to alarmingly high treatment failure rates in Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam for DHA-piperaquine, one of the world\u2019s most important anti-malaria drugs.
A large clinical trial in Africa and Asia has shown that a 7 day course of high dose primaquine, a drug used to treat P. vivax malaria, is well tolerated and just as effective as the current standard 14 day regimen, according to a study published this week in The Lancet. These findings have important implications for the treatment and elimination of vivax malaria in the Asia Pacific.
A project using drama that engages with village communities in Cambodia, led by Professor Phaik Yeong Cheah of the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit and Nuffield Department of Medicine, has won a Project award in this year\u2019s Vice-Chancellor\u2019s Public Engagement with Research Awards. The project also won the Vice-Chancellor\u2019s Choice Award for Public Engagement with Research.
This 5-day course is aimed at participants with a basic understanding of infectious disease modelling and an aptitude for the R programming language. On completion participants will be able to write and analyse the dynamics of a simple mathematical model and use it to consider cost and intervention scenarios. September 23-27 at St Anne\u2019s College, Oxford
To mark World Malaria Day on 25 April WWARN\u2019s Dr Makoto Saito and Professor Joel Tarning from the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit and Head of WWARN Pharmacometrics presented their work on prevention and treatment of malaria in vulnerable groups at a seminar hosted by the Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health
Increased funding is needed to eliminate malaria across 22 Asia-Pacific countries and save an estimated 400,000 lives, according to research published in a new collection of studies on Wellcome Open Research.
How do you go about building all the skills you need at the start of your research career? Cherry Lim from our MORU unit in Bangkok, Thailand, was lucky to find a good mentor who guided her through this journey, but her own ceaseless curiosity and excitement about research were also important.
Rob van der Pluijm presented encouraging findings from TRAC II trial analyses of Triple Artemisinin Combination Therapies to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Malaria & NTDs on March 19th in Westminster at the Houses of Parliament.
Lorenz Von Seidlein tells SciDev.Net that mass drug administration as \u201cpresumptive treatment\u201d to clear the parasite reservoir was carried out in eight villages spread across Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar and Vietnam. By the third month, the prevalence of P. falciparum had decreased by 92 % in those villages. Over the subsequent nine months, P. falciparum infections returned but stayed well below baseline levels, showing that MDA can stop transmission of falciparum malaria and reduce its prevalence in SE Asia, where resistance to artemisinin has hampered elimination efforts.
On 12 Feb 2019, Professor Arjen Dondorp published a new book: Sepsis Management in Resource-limited Settings. The result of a 3-year project led by MORU and the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine (ESICM), the book was written by critical care physicians from around the globe.
On 24-25 Jan 2019, investigators met in Bangkok to launch the Developing Triple Artemisinin-based Combination Therapies (DeTACT) Project. Led by MORU and funded by UKaid and the UK Department for International Development (DfID), DeTACT is a large, 14 site trial in 8 African and 5 Asian countries that will study the efficacy, safety and tolerability of two Triple Artemisinin Combination Therapy (TACT) combinations, using combinations of existing antimalarial drugs.
A recent WWARN individual patient meta-analysis has gathered 18 published and unpublished studies from Africa and Asia to explore the relationships between identified Kelch 13 mutant alleles and delayed parasite clearance. The study results show one P. falciparum specific mutant and 20 pfk13 propeller region mutant alleles are strongly associated with the slow clearance phenotype, including 15 mutations that have not been confirmed before. It was reassuring that no pfk13 alleles associated with slow parasite clearance were observed in the parasites from African studies gathered between 2000-2017.
An inspiring doctor and scientist of great compassion and intellect, Sir David Weatherall died 8 Dec 2018. A Nuffield Professor of Medicine, founder of the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine and a member of Wellcome\u2019s Board throughout the 1990s, Sir David was instrumental in the creation of MORU back in 1979.
A new Piperaquine Pharmacokinetics in Pregnancy Study Group is now open for participation at WWARN. The analysis hopes to determine the effect of pregnancy on the pharmacokinetic (PK) properties of piperaquine and contribute evidence to inform decisions on the use and optimal dosing of piperaquine in pregnant women.
This article, written by Professor Nick Day at MORU and published in the November 2018 issue of the Oxford Alumni Newsletter, describes in a nutshell all the good work our Centre is doing to promote Global Oxford.
Progress against malaria has stalled, and the disease remains a significant threat to billions of people despite the expensive, decades-long efforts to contain it. In an encouraging development, MORU reported complete success in curing hundreds of patients in Southeast Asia with new three-drug combinations mixing fast-acting artemisinin with two longer-lasting drugs. It it hoped that triple therapy should become the standard for malaria treatment.
Visit the Radcliffe Science Library before 4th January 2019 to see a new art exhibition of 14 prints illustrating the global health impact of poor quality medicines. The proliferation of poor quality medicines is an important but neglected public health problem, threatening millions of people all over the world, both in developing and wealthy countries.
Oxford University has been ranked as the world's best institution for medical and health teaching and research in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings for the eighth consecutive year. This ranking is based on criteria measuring teaching, research, industry income, international outlook and citations. It was noted that both research and clinical trials are supported by our network of international research units in Africa and Asia.
A systematic review analyses the results of 177 trials conducted between 1982 and 2016, including 18,436 patients who underwent electrocardiographic evaluation during malaria clinical trials. Nick White and colleagues found that serious cardiovascular side effects, which include sudden cardiac death, are very rare in the treatment of malaria with quinoline antimalarials. The work emphasises the importance of continued pharmacovigilance with the increasing use of quinoline antimalarials in mass treatment strategies such as intermittent preventative treatment and mass drug administration.
CTMGH have been nominated for the Market Research Society President's Medal, awarded annually to an organisation that conduct extraordinary research but who might not be recognised through the usual channels. Our Centre is noted for its ingenious use of freely available online satellite images to gath data on the use of antibiotics in unmapped and inaccessible villages in rural Thailand and Laos. Researchers use the images to identify representative clusters of potential participants.
Come and meet us at the ASTMH conference, to enjoy science over a pint and bite to eat: Outbreaks, from Ebola to Zika on Mon 29th Oct. Mosquitoes, the most dangerous animals in the world on Tue 30th. Global health terror night: bats, mites and other creepy crawlies on Wed 31st. We will be at The Vintage, 3121 Magazine St, New Orleans, 7-9pm
On 4 Oct 2018, the MORU Malaria Dept, in collaboration with the Global Sepsis Alliance (GSA), hosted the inaugural meeting of a proposed Asian Sepsis Alliance in Bangkok.
In this Science blog, field researchers, Dr Giacomo Zanello, Dr Marco Haenssgen, Ms Nutcha Charoenboon and Mr Jeffrey Lienert explain the importance of continuing to improve survey research techniques when working in rural areas of developing countries.
MORU is participating in a project to reduce antibiotic resistance on farms in Asia by educating farmers. In his first 12 years working as a vet in Bangladesh, Bikash Chandra Saha routinely prescribed antibiotics. Then he learned of the devastating impact of antimicrobial resistance on human health - and it revolutionized his treatment choices.
A team of researchers led by Yoel Lubell at MORU and IDDO used data from the USA and Thailand to link the consumption of antibiotics with the direct and indirect costs of treating patients for five drug-resistant bacterial infections.
The University of Oxford's Medical Sciences Divisional Panel has conferred the title of Associate Professor on three members of our academic staff: Rogier van Doorn (OUCRU), Lorenz von Seidlein (MORU) and George Warimwe (KWTRP). This title is awarded in recognition of their distinction in their respective fields and contributions to the research and teaching, and we congratulate them on their success.
Scientists are racing to stamp out the disease in Southeast Asia before unstoppable strains spread. This article features MORU, SMRU and colleagues, and explains what is happening and what we are doing to eliminate drug-resistant malaria in Southeast Asia before it spreads
Current recommended treatment regimens for the most widely used medicine for uncomplicated Plasmodium falciparum malaria may be sub-optimal for small children and pregnant women according to a study led by Professor Joel Tarning.
One of the world\u2019s most widely used anti-malarial drugs is safe to use, say researchers, after a thorough review and analysis of nearly 200,000 malaria patients who\u2019d taken the drug dihydroartemisinin-piperaquine (DHA-PPQ). There is such a low risk of sudden unexpected death from DHA-PPQ, one of the world\u2019s most effective medicines to treat malaria, that there is no need to limit its current use.
Primaquine can be used to prevent the transmission of falciparum malaria from human to mosquito. Bob Taylor and colleagues at the Mahidol Oxford Research Unit (MORU) have developed an age-based regimen for single low-dose primaquine to block the transmission of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa.
The rapid elimination of potentially untreatable P. falciparum malaria in South-East Asia is possible, according to a ground-breaking new study published today in The Lancet. The study authors say that setting up community-based malaria clinics for early diagnosis, treatment and monitoring, combined with mass antimalarial drug administration (MDA) to everyone living in \u2018hotspot\u2019 areas.
ITV News has travelled across the world to report on the growing global threat of the spread of deadly drug-resistant 'super bugs'. In the first of their three-part series, they investigate the frontline fight against deadly malaria parasites in South East Asia threatening a new global emergency.
18 April 2018 (London) \u2013 The United Kingdom\u2019s Department for International Development (DFID) announced that it will commit \u00a39.2 million (USD 13.15 million) of research funding to DeTACT (Development of Triple Artemisinin Combination Therapies), a large multi-centre trial in 5 Asian and 10 African countries that aims to develop two new safe and effective malaria treatments using combinations of existing antimalarial drugs.
As the second largest international donor, the UK has been at the forefront of efforts to reduce the number of cases for many years by investing in treatment, prevention and research, including the fight against the threat of drug resistance. The UK has announced further support for the fight against malaria to save more than 120,000 lives ahead of a Malaria Summit tomorrow with Commonwealth leaders.
Pailin, a small settlement nestling in tropical rainforest near Cambodia\u2019s border with Thailand, lies at the heart of a region that has seen successive waves of resistance to malaria drugs arise in local people and then spread across the globe. As new waves of the disease threaten our health, worried scientists want to conduct a mass inoculation in a Cambodian region where new vaccines always seem to stop being effective.
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