Wellcome Discovery Award secured for ground-breaking malaria research

The Wellcome Trust has awarded a prestigious Discovery Award to Professor Matt Higgins to support his research on “Molecular mechanisms of erythrocyte invasion in malaria”.  Professor Higgins, who holds the EP Abraham Chair of Structural Biology at the University of Oxford, works across the Department of Biochemistry, the Kavli Institute for NanoScience Discovery, and the Dunn School of Pathology.
 

Professor Matt Higgins

Professor Higgins and team were delighted to receive news of the successful application, ensuring funding of nearly £4 million for the project, in collaboration with colleagues from the Royal Veterinary College. He commented: “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.”