Chris Plowe and Abdoulaye Djimdé met in Mali, in the 1990s (upper left), while testing a new technique for monitoring malaria drug resistance. Once mentor and student, now they mentor each other’s students and stay with each other’s families while traveling.

Plowe and Djimdé share a passion for fighting malaria and are leaders in important research projects. Plowe—an HHMI investigator at the University of Maryland School of Medicine—focuses mainly on vaccine development. Djimdé, an HHMI international research scholar at the University of Bamako’s Malaria Research and Training Center, studies antimalarial drugs and the emergence of the malaria parasite’s resistance to them.

“Chris Plowe has been a major figure in the development of malaria research in Mali, especially with his work with the human populations,” says Thomas E. Wellems, chief of the Malaria and Vector Research laboratory at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)—and the researcher who first sent Plowe to Mali. “Both he and Djimdé perform brilliantly in the lab as well as in the field.” But the two scientists took vividly disparate routes to the field of malaria research.

Personal Tragedy

When Djimdé was a preteen living with his family in Koro, a Dogon village in eastern Mali, his 3-year-old brother, El-Hajj, suddenly spiked a high fever. “We took him to the hospital, but it was too late for proper treatment.” The boy died from cerebral malaria a few hours later. “It was a shock for the whole family,” recalls Djimdé, who was one of fifteen children. “That was the turning point when I decided to be a doctor and take care of sick kids who had malaria.”

In those days, villagers relied on traditional healers to treat malaria. The common form of the malady is called the “green season disease” because it appears when mosquitoes breed during the rainy months. The more serious cerebral malaria is considered a spiritual affliction called “wabu,” which healers treated with potions.

Determined to get away from tribal remedies and introduce more effective Western medications and treatment, Djimdé worked hard in school with the goal of becoming a medical doctor. The Mali educational system steered him to pharmacy school, however, and in 1989 he opened his own pharmacy. But Djimdé was still interested in malaria research, and when he heard about Plowe’s project, he volunteered to help. Soon, Djimdé moved to the U.S. to work with Plowe in Wellems’ NIAID lab.

		The Spread of Drug Resistant Malaria See how some forms of the malaria parasite have spread around the globe in the past three decades. Malaria Life Cycle Watch how a malaria parasite spreads from mosquito to human and back to mosquito.

Plowe’s Path

Born in South Dakota, Plowe had never traveled outside North America. He studied philosophy in college and after graduating enrolled in Cornell University Medical College, planning to specialize in surgery or psychiatry. Then he spent a summer doing epidemiology research in Indonesia and two years later—while still in medical school—he “got hooked on malaria research” during a stint in western Kenya setting up a research project led by Naval Medical Research Center scientist Steve Hoffman.

“Steve convinced me that malaria was the most important disease in the world and the most challenging biological problem,” Plowe recalls. Hoffman was impressed with Plowe’s talents at working with both African villagers and Western scientists. “He played a leadership role in getting that study off the ground,” Hoffman says. Eventually published in Science, the study “was a testimony to the kind of groundwork Chris did, and it was predictive of his later success.”

After he finished his residency in New York, Plowe spent three years as a postdoc in Wellems’ NIAID lab, where he studied the molecular biology of malaria parasites. He also got involved in developing a test for resistance to chloroquine—then the most widely used antimalarial drug. At that time, in the early 1990s, chloroquine resistance was spreading rapidly across the sub-Saharan region, from eastern into western Africa.

Monitoring patients for resistance was cumbersome, so it was difficult for doctors to know what antimalarial drugs to prescribe. The Wellems group had identified a gene associated with resistance but was searching for a practical way—rather than freezing blood samples and shipping them to labs—to use the genetic marker in remote areas. Plowe wanted to use blood spots on filter paper to extract DNA for analysis, even though previous efforts had failed.

He succeeded, and the project put Plowe on the map as an internationally known malaria researcher. “It was exciting to take a scientific advance and translate it into a public health tool that has had real impact,” Plowe says.

Adds Wellems: “It was a big challenge, but Chris made it work. Now that technique is used by researchers around the world.”

Photos: Courtesy of Chris Plowe

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