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Issue: 1071 Date: 3/3/2011
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SLU, Chinese scientists team up to tackle malaria
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Researchers at St. Louis University have teamed up with scientists at a Chinese health institute to study potential malaria treatments.
Leaders of the Center for World Health and Medicine at SLU and China's Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health worked together at Pfizer in St. Louis before layoffs in 2009 reduced the drug company's area work force.
Peter Ruminski, executive director of the SLU center, approached former Pfizer co-worker Micky Tortorella, now a vice president for the Chinese Academy of Sciences, to help lead the malaria project.
Malaria kills more than one million people a year in tropical regions, including in China, and the mosquito-borne disease is becoming more resistant to treatments, researchers said.
The international colleagues hold meetings using video software. The Chinese scientists focus on the chemistry of medicines and using animal models. At SLU, researchers are working in test tubes with the whole cell malaria parasite.
A next step could include scientist exchanges between the two countries, Ruminski said. In November 2009, Pfizer laid off 600 of its 1,000 St. Louis-area employees, most of them at the research campus in Chesterfield. About a dozen of those workers moved over to SLU to start the research center focused on health issues in impoverished countries.
"We can't save all 600 jobs, but we can preserve a core team here that has all this expertise and build upon that," Ruminski said.
The center launched in July with $5 million in startup funds. About $1 million to $2 million will be devoted to the malaria collaboration with the Chinese lab, which will contribute a matching amount, Ruminski said.
The world health center at SLU has also started projects looking at pediatric diarrhea, sickle cell disease and tuberculosis.
Researching treatments for diseases that prevail in underdeveloped countries is a departure from finding the most marketable drugs for a pharmaceutical company, Ruminski said.
But he asks, "Why shouldn't poor countries that have these neglected or orphan diseases lacking therapies ... also have the brightest trained people looking at those?" |
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