Ashley Vaughan

MPI, Core A
Seattle Children's Research Institute

Ashley has worked with Plasmodium parasites, the causative agents of malaria, since 2007. Ashley’s collaborations with Stefan Kappe and Sebastian Mikolajczak led to the use of human-liver chimeric mice for studying malaria liver stage development. These advances included complete liver stage development and the transition to blood stage parasitemia for the human malarias Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax. Ashley and his team also use this mouse model for the creation of experimental Plasmodium falciparum genetic crosses, the lynchpin of this P01 program. As part of the current P01 research, Ashley and his team will focus on genetic crosses with African strains of parasites that have reduced susceptibility to the frontline antimalaria drug, artemisinin. The team are also fascinated by the genetic drivers of parasite mosquito stage development, sporozoite infectivity for the liver and parasite liver stage development, phenotypes we believe are driven by genotypes.