Raising the curtain on cerebral malaria’s deadly agents

Tuesday, December 6, 2016

NIH scientists film inside mouse brains to uncover biology behind the disease.

Using state-of-the-art brain imaging technology, scientists at the National Institutes of Health filmed what happens in the brains of mice that developed cerebral malaria (CM). The results, published in PLOS Pathogens, reveal the processes that lead to fatal outcomes of the disease and suggest an antibody therapy that may treat it.

This image shows the brain of a mouse with cerebral malaria. There are white regions (to the left, on the brainstem and to the right, on the olfactory bulb) that indicate areas of neuronal cell death and vascular leakage