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Malaria Unit, Institute for Molecular Medicine, Lisbon, Portugal

There is little doubt that malaria presents a serious health risk and limits the economic growth potential of many countries in tropical Africa and other affected areas around the world. There is also little doubt that other methods of intervention effective against the disease are urgently required. A potential approach to malaria control is to target mechanisms crucial for the development of Plasmodium and/or the pathology caused by its infection. This requires detailed knowledge of the complex host cell-Plasmodium interactions. While hepatocyte-Plasmodium interactions during liver stage constitute an ideal target for prophylactic intervention, the blood stage of infection constitutes the ultimate goal for therapeutic strategies against the disease. The major goal of our laboratory is to identify host factors that contribute to the establishment of a malaria infection (liver stage) and to malaria pathology (blood stage).

Maria M. Mota graduated in Biology with an MSC in Immunology from the University of Porto (Portugal) in 1994. In 1998 she obtained her PhD in Molecular Parasitology from University College London (U.K.) after developing a research project at the National Institute for Medical Research under Anthony Holder´s supervision. She performed post-doctoral research in the Laboratory of Vitor Nussenzweig at the New York University Medical Center (Pathology and Parasitology Departments) from 1999 to 2002. She obtained the EMBO Young Investigator Award in 2004, the European Research Young Investigator Award in 2005, and in 2005 she became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute International Scholar. She became a group leader of the Host-Plasmodium Interactions Lab at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (Portugal) and since 2004 she has been the Malaria Unit group leader at Instituto de Medicina Molecular in Lisbon (Portugal). Recent research attempts to elucidate the molecular and cellular mechanisms behind the interactions occurring between Plasmodium (the malaria causative agent) and its mammalian host that contribute for the establishment and maintenance of the infection and appearance of pathology.