Geoffrey Hart
University of Minnesota, MN·Microbiology & Immunology
Malaria kills about 600,000 people a year and causes roughly 200,000 miscarriages and 20,000 maternal deaths, and nearly all of that harm comes from the blood stage of infection, when the parasite Plasmodium grows inside red blood cells. New vaccines and antibody drugs mostly target the earlier liver stage, so anyone they fail to protect is still exposed to blood-stage disease.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Biology
- Topics
malaria
Plasmodium
blood-stage infection
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2028
What they work on
- Test whether human NK cells, immune cells that kill antibody-coated targets, clear blood-stage Plasmodium in vivo by transferring them with human anti-merozoite antibodies into immunodeficient mice.
- Correlate the in vivo activity of transferred human NK cells with their killing of parasites in culture directed against RH5, the leading blood-stage malaria vaccine candidate, which mouse malaria parasites do not express.
- Use a genetically engineered immune-intact mouse model, modified to overcome differences in mouse NK cell function and antibody Fc receptor binding, to measure how much NK cells add to antibody-mediated parasite clearance.
- Quantify the Fc receptor-dependent share of antibody protection by comparing an anti-MSP1 merozoite-surface antibody with a LALAPG mutant version that cannot engage Fc receptors on immune cells.
More about the research
Antibodies clearly help control the blood stage, but exactly how they work is unclear. This project tests a specific idea: that natural killer (NK) cells — immune cells that destroy targets flagged by antibodies — team up with antibodies to kill merozoites, the parasite forms that burst out of a red blood cell to invade the next one, making those antibodies far more effective than they would be alone.
Why it matters
If NK cells substantially boost the parasite-killing power of antibodies, malaria vaccines and antibody therapies could be designed to recruit them deliberately rather than relying on neutralization alone. That would matter most for children and pregnant women, who bear the bulk of blood-stage malaria deaths, miscarriages and maternal mortality.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Juergen Bosch
Case Western Reserve University, OH·Biochemistry
Improve existing anti-malarial antibodies and design new ones based on humAb826827 and 864865, which bind PvAMA1, a Plasmodium vivax surface protein required to invade cells, by computationally generating about 1,000 antibody scaffolds per target epitope.
Susheela Tridandapani
Ohio State University, OH·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine how stimulating NOD2, an intracellular bacterial-fragment sensor, reshapes monocytes and CLL nurse-like macrophages, including loss of the inhibitory phosphatase SHIP1 and receptor CD31 and gain of the activating Fc receptor FcγRI.
Evelien Bunnik
University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, TX·Microbiology & Immunology
Identify which atypical B cell subsets are linked to protection against malaria, using spectral flow cytometry on malaria-experienced children matched for age and exposure but differing in immunity.
The school
University of Minnesota: 88 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 722 research doctorates a year.
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