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Fabia Battistuzzi, an assistant professor of biological sciences at Oakland University, won a $417,286 federal grant to examine the evolution of infectious diseases while laying the groundwork for new drug-based treatments that could help save thousands of lives, the univresity announces.
Fabia Battistuzzi
“Evolutionary trajectories of the past are predictors for the future,” Battistuzzi said in a statement. “They can reveal mechanisms of adaptation, such as how drug resistance evolved. With this information, we can start to envision strategies to prevent the evolution of stronger or new pathogens.”
The National Institutes of Health award was announced in late December.
“We are using malaria parasites for our studies because they are agents of one of the most deadly, infectious diseases in the world and also because they have some very useful characteristics,” Battistuzzi says.
“For example, different species of this pathogen infect different hosts so there has to be something in the genome that allows them to infect a human instead of a chimp. We think that by looking into their genome complexity and how it has changed through time we could add a piece to the puzzle that we are trying to reconstruct to understand what gives them their unique host preferences.”
We first saw this story in The Oakland Press.