news

Computational analysis identifies a new clinical phenotype of severe malaria

Posted: 4 September 2018 | | No comments yet

Researchers have applied a computational analysis based on networks in order to identify biologically relevant phenotypes apart from those currently defined by the WHO…

There are more clinical phenotypes of severe malaria than those defined by the World Health Organization (WHO), according to a study led by ISGlobal, an institution supported by “la Caixa” Foundation. The results indicate that heart failure can be a pathogenic mechanism of disease, which has implications in the clinical management of these patients.

Despite the progress achieved over the last decades, malaria is estimated to have caused almost half a million deaths in 2016, mostly among children. The definition of severe malaria was established to identify those children at risk of dying, but in reality, it is a complex and heterogeneous disease that not always responds to the recommended treatments.

Our results indicate that heart failure should be reconsidered as a pathogenic mechanism in severe malaria

The team led by Climent Casals-Pascual, a researcher at ISGlobal and at Oxford University, applied a computational analysis based on networks in order to identify biologically relevant phenotypes apart from those currently defined by the WHO (cerebral malaria, respiratory distress, and severe malarial anaemia). For this, they performed a ‘network-based clustering analysis’ with data from almost 3,000 Gambian children hospitalised with malaria. They found that the mortality was higher in those clusters with higher phenotypic heterogeneity. The analysis revealed four clusters of patients with both respiratory distress and severe anaemia, in which an increase in liver size was associated with higher mortality. By analysing the plasma proteins of these patients, they showed that this is likely due to heart failure.

 

Reserve your FREE place

 


Are you advancing promising antibody leads, only to encounter issues with stability, PK or manufacturability later in development?

30 July 2025 | 10:00 AM BST | FREE Webinar

Join us for an expert-led webinar exploring how early-stage developability assessment can help reduce downstream risk and improve candidate selection.

What You’ll Learn:

  • How to identify key developability risks early including aggregation, PK, and manufacturability
  • How to implement high-throughput in vitro assays requiring <1 mg of antibody per test
  • How to combine in silico modeling with wet-lab analytics to guide early optimisation

Don’t miss your chance to learn from Dr Lei Guo.

Register Now – It’s Free!

 

“Our results indicate that heart failure should be reconsidered as a pathogenic mechanism in severe malaria,” explains Casals-Pascual, “and that therefore the standard clinical management may not be appropriate for these patients”. This type of “systems approach” can be a very valuable tool to identify new phenotypes and mechanisms as well as therapeutic options for complex diseases”, he adds.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *