Hosted by the Department of Global and Environmental Health
Malaria kills 600,000 people every year, mostly African children under the age of five. The only highly effective antimalarials in the world today -- artemisinin-based combination therapies or ACTs -- have been in use globally for 20 years and have helped reduce the burden of malaria by 50% and global annual mortality by 30%. In August 2020, when the world was preoccupied with the pre-vaccine phase of the COVID pandemic, artemisinin-resistant genotypes of Plasmodium falciparum malaria were reported to be circulating in Rwanda. These genotypes now pose the risk of treatment failure for hundreds of millions of patients that rely on ACTs for malaria treatment every year. Similar novel artemisinin-resistant genotypes were identified in Uganda in 2021 and Ethiopia in 2023, and cross-border spread has been identified in Kenya and Tanzania. National Malaria Control Programs (NMCPs) in African countries are now planning country-level responses to delay or slow down the spread of artemisinin resistance. In this seminar, epidemiologist Dr. Maciej F Boni will discuss which of these strategies are projected to be most effective.
Boni's academic background is in mathematical epidemiology, mathematical population genetics, individual-based disease transmission models, field epidemiology, phylogenetics, and recombination. His main focus areas are drug-resistance mitigation strategies for malaria and the dynamics and evolution of influenza virus in the tropics. His main work in malaria focuses on optimal methods of distributing antimalarial drugs to minimize the risks and slow the spread of drug resistance. Research on respiratory disease transmission in the tropics has included field epidemiology, clinical research, community studies, sequence analysis, and modeling. From 2008 to 2016, Dr. Boni’s research group was based in Ho Chi Minh City, at the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit. From 2016 to 2023, the Boni Lab was based at the Biology Department and the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics (CIDD) at Pennsylvania State University. As of Jan 2024, the Boni Lab is based at Temple University — in the Department of Biology and the Institute for Genomics and Evolutionary Medicine.