Professor Aaron Maule and his team spend their time trying to understand parasites, infectious organisms that even today have a powerful grip on the health and economy of the world.
He says, ‘Even though they undermine human and animal health and welfare, as well as agricultural productivity and food security, we can only marvel at their success, their remarkable resilience and their unique biology.’
Professor of Molecular Parasitology at the Queen’s School of Biological Sciences, he is also Director of Research for Molecular Biosciences, working to develop novel strategies for the control of parasitic worms that infect people, plants and animals, particularly, although not exclusively, in developing countries.
He says, ‘Many human diseases caused by parasites are designated as neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) which are pervasive among the poorest and most underprivileged people on the planet. These are people who are unable to help themselves. They don’t have financial power or a political voice and so these diseases attract low health priority status.
‘Most of the drugs used to control these worms were generated from veterinary medicine pipelines because of the economic consequences of these diseases among farm animals. Later these same drugs often become translated for human medicine. However there are serious gaps in our portfolio of anti-parasitic drugs and these shortfalls drive much of the research we do.’
For the past ten years, Professor Maule has been involved in a collaborative project run by the US National Institute of Health looking at the blood fluke, a parasite that causes a chronic disease that affects 200m people and is especially prevalent among children.
‘Our remit is figuring how the worm thinks, how it coordinates its behaviours, discovering the chemicals that control that,"... working to develop novel strategies for the control of parasitic worms that infect people, plants and animals." with a view to making drugs that will disrupt their ability to survive and cause disease.’
He and his Queen’s colleagues are also the co-ordinators of a collaborative international project centred in India. Funded by the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), it is tackling liver fluke, a huge problem to global livestock producers and an emerging human NTD.
‘The consortium includes researchers from the University of Aberystwyth and two universities in India: Madras Veterinary College and Aligarh Muslim University, who collectively are identifying, validating and testing new vaccine targets for the control of liver fluke.
‘Our specific contribution is the development and application of gene silencing platforms which allow us to selectively switch off a gene in the parasite and so identify which genes cause worm death or paralysis. These could then have value as drug or vaccine targets for fluke control.
‘We validate the drug targets in the tropical form of liver fluke and our Indian partners run these through vaccine trials. If successful, this could also resonate at home, as liver fluke is the most common disease seen in local abattoirs. Indeed, recently published models on liver fluke spread with climate change have predicted an epidemic in the UK by 2020.
‘We’re being encouraged by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council to take this reverse genetics technology we’ve developed to India for the benefit of poor farming communities. To this end, in visits to Chennai, Erode and the Ooty region in Tamil Nadu, we went to farm areas where liver fluke disease is rife and we ran workshops for field veterinarians, gathering data and providing advice on approaches. This is a key part of the impact we’re making.
Spreading the knowledge is crucial. ‘Animal health pharmaceutical companies in the US are showing keen interest in applying these technologies in parasites in order to aid their selection of new drug targets.
‘Parasites are remarkable, resilient animals. They can endure complex and torturous life cycles, manipulate the behaviour of their host, evade the host immune system, genetically modify the host cells to their own advantage and resist control by chemotherapy and vaccines. That’s what we’re up against.
But his outlook is positive and optimistic. ‘Researchers from labs working in this field right throughout Europe have been here at Queen’s to learn about these technologies. More and more researchers are using these platforms to exploit the genome data that’s accumulating, and this will undoubtedly lead to advances in the development of next generation drugs and vaccines.’
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