An article in the May 2012 issue of Science Translational Medicine by an international team of researchers including SFU microbiology professor Fiona Brinkman reports on a potential new treatment for severe malaria.

The fatality rate for cases of severe malaria remains high because antimalarial drugs do not alleviate life-threatening inflammation. The researchers have found that a new class of anti-inflammatory drugs, in conjunction with antimalarial treatment, increased survival of mice infected with the disease. SFU postdoctoral fellow David Lynn led the SFU research component of the project.

Professor Brinkman and her SFU team, working with the BC Centre for Disease Control, were the first to combine the latest techniques of whole bacterial genome analysis with social networking surveys to identify the source of a tuberculosis outbreak in a local community in 2011.