$8.4M grant will extend MSU researcher's malaria study

BLANTYRE, MALAWI - Terrie Taylor has spent six months every year for the last three decades working with children suffering from malaria in the east African country of Malawi.

Thanks to an $8.4 million grant from the National Institute of Health, the Michigan State University professor will spend at least the next seven years finding ways to improve care for malaria-infected patients.

“This grant is an absolutely critical next step in the process,” Taylor said Monday, speaking by phone from Blantyre, Malawi's second largest city.

Dr. Terrie Taylor: one child at a time

Taylor’s upcoming clinical trial will focus on better understanding the cause and treatment for brain swelling that occurs among children who contract malaria. Many of these children die, unable to breathe because swelled brains push out toward the bottom of the skull. That pressure often lands on the area of the brain stem that prompts the impetus to take a breath. Patients then stop breathing, often resulting in death, Taylor said, especially in areas of the world where ventilators aren’t readily available.

Mortality for those suffering from malaria is about 37%, Taylor said. The NIH-funded projects aims to cut mortality down to 17%.

In its 2016 world malaria report, the World Health Organization estimated the disease killed between 235,000 and 639,000 people in 2015, with 92% of deaths occurring across Africa. Approximately 212 million new cases of malaria were reported worldwide in 2015, the report states.

Researchers long suspected brain swelling was behind the deaths of patients who recently contracted Malaria, Taylor said. The challenge came in proving it, made more difficult by the fact that standard autopsy procedures destroyed evidence of the pressure.

“Had we not used an MRI, we never would have appreciated the process,” Taylor said

Taylor plans to investigate four potential solutions to the brain swelling. One involving putting children on ventilators in hopes that swelling goes down after the initial onset of symptoms. Another is using a saline solution to draw water out of swollen tissues, including the brain.

Efforts to combat malaria through insect control and other measures ironically made Taylor’s trail more difficult because there are fewer afflicted patients to analyze. Taylor said she caught a break when the project’s underwriter made it a seven-year trial, a couple years longer than standard.

“It’s really stressful to try to find enough patients for the usual four-to-five-year grant,” she said.

Clinical trials are scheduled to begin in April at a pediatric surgery and intensive care unit being built by Raising Malawi, an organization founded by pop-star Madonna in 2006 aiming to improve the lives of the country’s children.

Contact RJ Wolcott at (517) 377-1026 or rwolcott@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @wolcottr.