Malaria is a hot button issue for many human rights activists. It is the most deadly communicable disease on earth, killing over 1 million people every year. Yet it is one of the least studied diseases. Many claim this paradox is due to the fact that virtually all deaths from malaria occur in undeveloped countries and decimate populations with no financial resources.

There are some drugs that can be used in the treatment of malaria, but over time the parasites evolve immunity to the drug, renderring them ineffective. Every ten years or so a new malaria drug must be developed. Resaerchers have attempted to develop vaccines to malaria before, but haven't been able to produce enough proteins specific to Plasmodium (the malaria causing parasite) to initiate a host reaction, until now.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins have expressed enough Pfs48/45 (a Plasmodium protein) to develop a vaccine that initiates antibody production in mice and non-human primates. Protection against malaria may be on the horizon.

To read more about this research, click here

Are you optimized for peak performance?

Does biology play a role in "clutch" performance? Protein interactions in the brain could help predict who will rise up when the pressure is on and who will fold. A review recently written by Martin Paulus and colleagues takes a deeper look at the studies that have investigated high pressure performance in order to see what can be taken away from the data collected.

The authors posit that optimized stress response in the brain may contribute to high performance in intense situations and environments.

What do you think? Is performance in intense situations biological? Does training, motivation or personality play a role?

As many of you are probably already aware, during his inaugural speech Obama said he wanted to "restore science to its rightful place". This has sparked many people, including scientists and science enthusiasts, to post their views about where science belongs. I thought it might be worthwhile to start a similar discussion on mySDscience.com.

I'm curious about your ideas on what the rightful place of science is. But I'm even more curious about ideas on how we get science to that rightful place and how it got pushed out in the first place.

As sceintists I think one of the keys to addressing this is re-engaging the public. Getting people informed about science is starting to become an important goal in science, as evidenced by the San Diego Science Festival help last April. What other efforts will get people involved in science? Any ideas?

Let me know what you think on any of these issues.

While I was writing my last article on predictive tools and their emerging role in drug development some one posed the question of whether or not these approaches will ever really save money. They found it unlikely that a drug candidate would ever really be shut down just because some model suggests it might have possible side effects. Instead this prediction would just lead to more testing and more spending. Is this true?

More and more predictive tools and computer modeling are becoming a common part of science. Protein structure, pathway interactions and molecule interactions are all being modeled these days. Whole careers are focused on finding ways to make the modeling systems more accurate.

What is the real role of modeling in science? Will we ever be able to wholly replace bench work with computer simulation? Are these tools real value as sign posts-telling us which direction is the best to follow? Or will they forever be relegated to telling us things we already know? Are there any drawbacks to computer modeling?

Let me know what you think.

To read my article on the drug interaction modeling approach of Chemical Systems Biology click here.

Image provided by addiandcassie.com/rethink/

At a routine check-up recently the nurse asked me if I drink and I said yes. When she asked me how much I said it probably evened out to about one a day. She told me that was nothing, but what if I was one of those people who crammed a week's worth of drinks into a single night? Would that still be nothing? 

Not a lot is known about the effects of binge drinking aside from the splitting headaches and nauseau people experience the next morning. But what do those symptoms mean for your body? After all, isn't this a mild kind of alcohol poisoning? Researchers at UC San Diego are starting to look into the effects of binge drinking and what it does to a person's brain.

To find out more read my article under "Local Sci-News" above or click here