Papa Makhtar Drame, PhD, MSc

Senior Postdoctoral Scientist, Kansas State University

About the lecture

Parasitic infections of humans cause some of the most deadly or/and debilitating diseases. The global efforts for eliminating vector-borne parasitic diseases such as filarial infections and malaria by mass drug administration programs, combined with or without vector control, require additional diagnostic biomarker tools. The accurate and sensitive detection of viable parasites is essential for diagnosis and for surveillance programs aiming at elimination of these infections. High-throughput sequencing, mass spectroscopy methods and advances in computational biology have greatly accelerated the discovery process of biomarkers for disease diagnostic use. Here, Drame will first talk about specific biomarkers of mosquito bites to assess the risk of malaria and their application in the evaluation of the efficacy of different types of malaria vector control research studies across different epidemiological settings in Africa. Secondly, he will discuss the discovery of biomarkers of infections with filarial parasites and the development of several kind of immunological assays to detect them in plasma, serum or urine. Finally, Drame will cover the development of molecular assays for the diagnosis of malaria and filarial infections and their application in the assessment of the molecular epidemiology of these infections in co-endemic areas.

Lunch will be catered by Guasaca. This event is sponsored by the Malaria Research Initiative at DGHI. 

About the speaker

Drame received his MSc and PhD in Biological Sciences with a concentration in immuno-epidemiology from Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar, Senegal. For his doctoral research at the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD) in Montpellier (France) and Cotonou (Benin), he developed novel sensitive biomarkers of Anopheles mosquito bites and new indicators of efficacy of malaria vector control by studying the human immune responses to mosquito vector salivary proteins. Then, he worked for five years as a postdoctoral fellow in the Laboratory of Parasitic Diseases at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health (NIH), in Bethesda, MD. During his appointment at NIH, Drame significantly contributed to the discovery of specific biomarkers of filarial helminth parasite infections, to the development of immunological and molecular assays for the point-of-care diagnosis of parasitic diseases, and to the study of the dynamics of malaria and filarial helminth parasite infections in situation of polyparasitism using molecular tools. Currently appointed as a senior postdoctoral scientist at Kansas State University in the laboratory of vector biology, he seeks to study immune response to Anopheles darlingi and Anopheles albimanus (the two main vectors of malaria in the Americas) saliva with the aim to develop specific biomarkers of malaria infection and the role of microRNAs and/or exosomes present in the saliva of the mosquito vector during infection with malaria and to develop molecular assays for the detection of asymptomatic and submicroscopic malaria infections (sexual and asexual stages) to support control and elimination.