Plating Plasmodium
Modeling liver-stage malaria with stem cell-derived hepatocytes
The best way to test new therapies or vaccines for malaria is to study them in the early liver stage of infection before disease appears in the blood and the parasites reinfect mosquitos. A group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology has created a liver cell-based screening system that could bring personalized medicine to the developing world disease by using stem-cell derived hepatocytes, and plans to use the cells to screen compounds for malaria.
The induced hepatocyte-like cells - derived from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells or obtained as iCell hepatocytes from Cellular Dynamics International Inc. - trump the standard cultured HEPG2 liver cell line on biological relevance and are more scalable and readily available than donor-derived hepatocytes...