Human stem cells engineered to produce renewable sources of mature, liver-like cells can be grown and infected with malaria to test potentially life-saving new drugs, according to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The advance comes at a time when the parasitic mosquito-borne disease, which kills nearly 600,000 people every year, is showing increased resistance to current treatment, especially in Southeast Asia, according to the World Health Organization.
The liver-like cells, or hepatocytes, in the MIT study were manufactured from stem cells derived from donated skin and blood samples.
The resulting cells provide a potentially replenishable platform for testing drugs that target the early stage of malaria, when parasites may linger and multiply in the liver for weeks before spreading into the bloodstream.
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Sangeeta Bhatia, a biomedical engineer and senior author of the MIT report, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that the breakthrough study not only showed that these liver-like cells could host a malaria infection but also described a way to mature the young cells so that an adult-like metabolism, necessary for drug development, could be established.
Read full, original article: Stem cells offer promising key to new malaria drugs: U.S. research
