Viola Introini
Postdoctoral Fellow
Bernabeu Group
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Malaria still claims more than 600,000 deaths every year. All symptoms start when Plasmodium falciparum infects human red blood cells. Malaria’s most severe complication, cerebral malaria (CM), is characterised by the sequestration of infected red blood cells in the brain vasculature leading to vessel occlusion, compromised blood-brain barrier, and subsequent brain swelling. Different areas of the brain show distinctive vascular pathologies linked to CM, leading me to hypothesise that the heterogeneity of CM pathology is due to different regional microcirculations. To overcome the lack of a suitable animal model for investigating CM progression, I propose to recapitulate the microvasculature architecture of white matter, grey matter, and retina using cutting-edge bioengineering approaches and include relevant perivascular cells to provide the tissue physiological structure. The effect of biophysical cues such as temperature will be systematically investigated to unveil the biophysical and molecular mechanism of sequestration. This novel pipeline would inform and validate my in vitro findings leading to new therapies and opening up new venues for neurovascular disease research.