Maternal malaria researcher wins prestigious international prize
11 June 2008
Professor Nosten of the SMRU has been awarded the Christophe et Rodolphe Merieux Foundation Prize, a €400 000 prize awarded to a researcher or research team studying infectious diseases in developing countries, presented by the Institut de France.
"I'm delighted to have received this award," says Professor Nosten. "The recognition from my home country for the work of myself and my colleagues is very important, and the prize money will allow me to conduct more work on maternal malaria, a poorly-researched area."
Malaria is one of the world's deadliest killers, killing over a million people each year, mainly pregnant women and young children in Africa and South-east Asia. Although treatments exist to tackle the disease, which is caused by Plasmodium parasites, until Professor Nosten's work little was known about how to treat pregnant women, particularly in areas where the parasites have been increasingly developing resistance to treatment.
"Pregnant women are always excluded from clinical trials because of the fear of harming the unborn baby," explains Professor Nosten. "Paradoxically it was considered unethical to recruit pregnant women in studies, but ethical to leave them untreated."
Professor Nosten, together with Professor Nick White, Chairman of the Wellcome Trust's South-east Asia Programme, began researching maternal malaria over 20 years ago in 1986 on the border of Thailand and Burma where they saw many pregnant women dying from malaria. By organising antenatal consultations for all pregnant women to screen their blood every week during the pregnancy, they were able to detect malaria parasites quickly and treat them before they developed into severe infection.
"The antenatal screenings were very time intensive, but the system worked beautifully," says Professor Nosten. "The number of pregnant women dying from malaria fell from one death per 100 live births to zero."
The success of their approach enabled the team to focus on the prevention and treatment of malaria in pregnant women, an area where very few studies had previously been conducted. Professor Nosten and colleagues have undertaken most of the clinical trials looking at the best treatment options, including looking at how antimalarials are absorbed and metabolised by the body. This allowed them to discover that pregnancy alters the efficacy of antimalarials and that the doses of medicines given to pregnant women were too low and therefore less efficacious.
Their work has led to a revision of guidelines produced by the World Health Organisation (WHO), which now recommend treating women in the second and third trimesters of pregnancy with artemisinin combination therapies. They have also provided almost all the available clinical evidence on the safety of treating pregnant women with artemisinin therapies, including the largest series on exposure during the first trimester.
Professor White says: " François and his team work in very difficult circumstances, yet they have produced some of the most important research on the treatment of malaria, which has led to a global change in treatment recommendations. They have conducted pivotal work on the epidemiology, pathophysiology and treatment of malaria in pregnancy, and changed the way it is treated."
"I would like to congratulate François on receiving well-deserved recognition for his important achievements," says Dr Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust. "Malaria is one of the world's major killers and treating pregnant women has often proved complicated and potentially dangerous. Thanks to the work of Francois and his colleagues, however, the treatment options are now much clearer, reducing the risk to the mothers. His work has been invaluable for saving the lives of many women and their unborn children."
Contact
Craig Brierley
Media Officer
Wellcome Trust
T +44 (0)20 7611 7329
E
c.brierley@wellcome.ac.uk
Notes for editors
1. The Wellcome Trust is the largest charity in the UK. It funds innovative biomedical research, in the UK and internationally, spending around £650 million each year to support the brightest scientists with the best ideas. The Wellcome Trust supports public debate about biomedical research and its impact on health and wellbeing.
2. About the Institut de France's Christophe et Rodolphe Mérieux Foundation Prize:
Once a year, Fondation Christophe et Rodolphe Mérieux awards the Christophe Mérieux Prize to a researcher or a research team studying infectious diseases in developing countries. This distinction offers each recipient international recognition, and the award money helps accelerate and sustain research. The Institut de France chooses the prize winner, according to its own procedures and in consultation with the academies. Fondation Mérieux submits those people that it identifies from its various activities in the field to the Institute.