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Working in Tandem
Plowe met Djimdé while testing his filter paper technique in the villages of Mali. The two young researchers eventually became close friends during their time in Wellems’ lab at NIAID. “We spent a lot of hours together in the lab and in the field,” recalls Plowe, who describes Djimdé as “an incredibly talented scientist who I am proud to call friend.” Djimdé calls Plowe “a mentor who always went the extra mile to help me get established as a scientist.”
Even after Plowe left Wellems’ lab for a stint as a fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, he kept working with Djimdé and the NIAID group on malaria projects. “When Tom’s lab found the gene that causes chloroquine resistance, Djimdé and I developed a fairly robust test to detect mutations of the gene. Even before that was published, we shared the protocol with the World Health Organization so it could be used in the field.”
“We spent a lot of hours together in the lab and in the field,” recalls Plowe, who describes Djimdé as “an incredibly talented scientist who I am proud to call friend.”
Christopher Plowe
And when Plowe joined the University of Maryland faculty in 1995, he convinced Djimdé to become his first Ph.D. student. Djimdé’s thesis focused on the molecular mechanisms of malaria resistance to chloroquine.
“It was an emotional time for me. We were the first to document that resistance in the field, showing that this gene was responsible for chloroquine resistance in Mali,” says Djimdé, who returned to his home country to continue his research in 2001. “When the paper came out in the New England Journal of Medicine I got calls and e-mails from all over the world.”
Plowe says the thesis work “has been extremely influential. It laid an important foundation for the study of the molecular basis for malaria resistance.”
Plowe’s own interest in that area has led him to assess the new wave of resistance to artemisinin-based combination therapies, or ACTs, which replaced chloroquine over the last two decades as the most commonly prescribed antimalarial drug. Used for centuries in China, artemisinin compounds were introduced in Africa to treat malaria in the 1980s and appeared to be thwarting the typical trend of drug resistance. But researchers found signs of artemisinin resistance in western Cambodia a few years ago.
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“We don’t have the right tools yet to track and monitor artemisinin resistance, which is why I’ve shifted my attention on the drug-resistance side to Southeast Asia,” says Plowe. “We’re trying, in a much more accelerated fashion, what it took Tom Wellems 15 years to do in pinpointing chloroquine resistance.”
In a project that involves scientists at Oxford University, Mahido University in Thailand, and the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Medical Sciences in Bangkok, Plowe’s lab is doing genomic studies to pinpoint gene loci that could be used as markers for that resistance. The goal is to give scientists around the world access to comprehensive data to help determine which antimalarial drugs should be used in which regions.
“The whole discussion of malaria eradication and elimination will come to a screeching halt if artemisinin resistance spreads throughout Asia and gets to Africa,” he says. “We’re trying to develop the tools to detect that resistance and head it off.”
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