Monday, December 27, 2004 MIT cheers his malaria fight, cell by tiny cell RESHMA PATIL MUMBAI, DECEMBER 25 On the world map of medicine�s war against malaria, an engineer with roots in IIT Chennai is cutting new headway from a lab at MIT, Massachusetts.
His first love is not biology, but non-living materials and structures at the nano scale: 1/80,000th the breadth of a human hair. Subra Suresh (48), head of MIT�s department of materials science and engineering since 2000, has manoeuvred engineering tools that probe mechanical properties of materials, to provide new quantitative insights into how malaria affects human red blood cells. In January, Suresh and his team at the National University of Singapore and the universities of Heidelberg and Ulm in Germany, will report what MIT terms the ��most complete and quantitative characterisation yet�� of how a normal human blood cell deforms when a malaria-inducing parasite (Plasmodium falciparum) invades it and matures inside. The process is a key factor in the progression of malaria. To this Ford professor of engineering, it is elegant science, and possibly the stuff for future drugs and treatments against a disease that kills 3 million a year�mostly children. ��We are now working with parasitologists, medical doctors, biologists and biochemists in linking these results to molecular level processes so that eventually better drugs can be developed,�� Suresh, professor of mechanical and biological engineering, told The Sunday Express from MIT. ��I was interested because this is a topic of concern to the developing world, especially India,�� says Suresh. Healthy red blood cells can move through the smallest blood vessels. But parasite-infected cells have a problem, often sticking to other cells and to blood vessel walls. Suresh�s team tinkered with optical tweezers or silica beads that are hooked to opposite sides of a red blood cell. A laser beam pointed at one bead can ��trap�� and tug the cell. ��While others have used optical tweezers to study deformation of red cells,�� states an MIT newsletter, ��the forces they�ve been able to apply are far less than those needed to induce the deformation that cells would experience in the body.�� The strain MIT achieved was similar to what a red blood cell experiences when travelling through blood vessels. ��The forces we can measure reproducibly are as small as a pico Newton, which is one-thousandth of one-billionth of a Newton (a medium-sized apple weighs one Newton, a unit of force),�� says Suresh, adding, ��this is even finer than nanotechnology.�� The result: The first measurement of physical changes in the living cell when a malaria parasite develops inside it. Working with scientists, biologists and engineers, the properties of a healthy red blood cell and a parasite-infected cells were then extracted and studied by experiments and 3D computer modelling. ��We show that the effect of the parasite on the cell�s deformability and its possible connection to malaria progression is significantly greater than previously thought,�� says Suresh, calling the characterisation achieved as ��full, complete and systematic.�� The report, which also describes work on deformation of human pancreatic cancer cells, will be published in the January issue of Acta Biomaterialia. Collaborating with Institute Pasteur in Paris, the team is now trying to quantify how specific proteins transferred from the surface of parasite to the cell alter its mechanical properties and stickiness, for pointers to biochemical means to treat cell deformability. ��We are not the first to apply engineering tools to study malaria,�� says Suresh. ��But our work shows the reduction in the cell�s deformability is as much as a factor of ten after only 36 hours of parasitisation. Previously it was thought to be much less, only a factor of two or three. This can be significant for potential treatments,�� says Suresh. The work is supported by the NUS, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany, the German Science Foundation, the Interdisciplinary Center for Clinical Research at the University of Ulm, and the Association for International Cancer Research. URL: http://www.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=40023 ------------------------ Yahoo! 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