Kavli Oxford’s Matt Higgins receives a Wellcome Discovery Award to support research into malaria cell invasion

Kavli Oxford’s Matt Higgins receives

Wellcome Discovery Award

to support research into malaria cell invasion

Kavli Oxford’s Professor Matt Higgins has received a Wellcome Discovery Award of nearly £4 million to study how malaria parasites invade red blood cells.

The eight-year award will support his project, 'Molecular mechanisms of erythrocyte invasion in malaria', carried out in collaboration with colleagues at the Royal Veterinary College.

Professor Higgins is the EP Abraham Chair of Structural Biology at the University of Oxford and works across the Department of Biochemistry, the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience Discovery, and the Dunn School of Pathology. His research focuses on the molecular processes that allow malaria parasites to interact with and enter human cells.

 

 In order for the malaria parasite to replicate and to make us sick, it must get inside our red blood cells. We have been very generously funded since 2013 to understand how this fascinating process works. We are hugely grateful for another eight years of funding, which will allow us to reveal how three pieces of the machinery which drive this process function. This knowledge will also guide our attempts to design improved vaccines to prevent malaria. We are looking forward to getting started and to sharing what we find. – Professor Matt Higgins

You can read more about the Higgins Lab's research here.