Mallika Imwong

My research works have focused on three aspects:

• to understand how drug resistance emerges and spreads in malaria parasites in Asia and Africa
• to detect and characterise the true epidemiology of malaria in low transmissions setting
• to investigate the biology of relapse of benign malaria.

I am currently involved in surveillance studies describing the molecular epidemiology of drug resistance in different parts of the region including Thai-Burmese border, Eastern Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos PDA, and Afghanistan. A key objective is to determine the genetic and mechanistic basis for increased resistance of P. falciparum to artemisinin. The development of an inexpensive and effective genetic tool is essential for public health monitoring for artemisinin resistance.  My ongoing projects will use genotyping markers or phenotypic properties for the fitness cost alleviating genetic variants validated loci and conduct follow-up molecular epidemiological surveys to assess their prevalence throughout the GMS in the current state of transmission. Therefore, this will also allow us to assess the potential of the GMS to develop drug resistance phenotypes and to evaluate the potential that such phenotypes emerge in other parts of the malaria world (such as Africa), as control programs progress towards elimination.