Multidisciplinary Implementation Research for malaria control and elimination in West Africa

Abstract Despite a substantial reduction in the incidence and deaths related to malaria in sub-Sahara Africa, the region still carries a disproportionate share of the global burden of malaria. The overall goal of this ICEMR program is to understand the persistence of malaria in the context of the wide deployment of control interventions and provide evidence-based approaches for developing optimal combinations of control strategies for interrupting residual malaria transmission. We will characterize critical barriers related to changing epidemiological patterns and drug and insecticide resistance to develop contextually tailored interventions to address the evolving needs of malaria control programs. This ICEMR encompasses 3 Projects with the goals summarized as follows: 1] Epidemiology Project (Project 1): the goal is to investigate the residual malaria transmission to develop and evaluate optimal control strategies at study sites in Mali, representing different eco-zones across West Africa, 2]Malaria immuno-genetics Project (Project 2): The goal of this project is to study factors associated with gametocytogenesis in symptomatic and asymptomatic disease and their contributions to transmission in low transmission season setting (parasite and human genetics, immune response, and transmissibility) in relation with malaria control interventions in Mali, 3] Malaria vector and transmission field ecology project (Project 3): will characterize low residual transmission studying malaria vector populations and ecology in the continuum rural-urban and peri-urban setting of Bamako, Mali. These projects link the different aspects of malaria transmission and disease into a unified whole, adding the ability to distinguish the contributions of different malaria control interventions on parasite population and range of immune responses (Project 2, Immunopathogenesis) and seasonal and geographical distribution of anopheline mosquitoes vectors (Project 3). Understanding the factors relating entomological with epidemiological transmission patterns will provide more appropriate guidelines for malaria control tailored to different ecological settings in Mali and West Africa.