Taylor Receives NIH Grant to Study Malaria in Malawi
Spending six months of the year in the midst of a malaria epidemic in the African nation of Malawi may not sound like the ideal career to most people, but Terrie Taylor, DO, associate professor of internal medicine at MSUCOM, wouldnπt have it any other way.
For years, Dr. Taylor has been splitting her time between the East Lansing campus and the far-away world of Malawi, and her efforts are paying off.
Studying cerebral malaria in children has become a passion for her. Although she has received small grants from various organizations, in the past to fund her research, she has just been awarded her first major grant from the National Institutes of Health to continue her work. The official title of her grant, which came in just under the $1 million mark, is ≥Clinicopathological Correlates of Cerebral Malaria.≤
In laypersonπs terms, this means that she will be studying how malaria kills patients. Little is known about the actual mechanism of death in African children. Between one and two million children die every year from malaria. More knowledge of the actual process involved may allow more effective treatments to be developed.
A clinical trial recently completed in the Malawi project in Blantyre, and analyzed in conjunction with the epidemiology program at MSU, demonstrated that even though the new drug, a derivative of a Chinese herb, qinghaosu, was able to rid the blood of malaria parasites twice as fast as the standard treatment, quinine, there was no effect on mortality. This suggests that other processes are at work, Dr. Taylor explained. The post mortem study is designed to uncover these processes and suggest alternative treatment strategies.
As part of her research project, Dr. Taylor heads an international team of researchers from America ã including Charles MacKenzie, PhD, chairperson of pathology at MSU ã Europe and Africa. Together, this team will conduct autopsies on children who die from malaria other causes at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre, Malawi.
After the malaria season passes, Dr. Taylor and her team will begin to analyze their findings.
So, how does a person decide to make malaria research a key part of her career? For Dr. Taylor, the realization happened over time and took a unique path.
A 1981 graduate of the Chicago College of Osteopathic Medicine and salutatorian of her class, Dr. Taylor first became interested in medicine overseas as a student. After completing her internship at Riverside Hospital in Trenton, Mich., she signed on for a one-year stint as an instructor with the Sudan Medical Parasitology Research Project at Michigan State University. The project was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Once she finished her work with the Sudan project, Dr. Taylor headed to Detroit to complete a general internal medicine residency at Detroit Osteopathic Hospital, and from there, decided to obtain more training in tropical medicine from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in the United Kingdom.
Upon conferring with then MSUCOM Dean Myron S. Magen, DO, Dr. Taylor decided to pursue a faculty position at MSUCOM.
≥Dr. Magen had the vision to see that the college should be involved in international outreach, and was very supportive of my proposal. In fact, he and the college not only gave me the flexibility to teach on campus six months of the year and spend the other half of the year in Malawi, they funded my research until other grants started to come in,≤ Dr. Taylor said.
≥I donπt think many other people or institutions would have given me the opportunities Iπve had at MSUCOM,≤ she added.
≥One of the reasons Iπve loved being part of the osteopathic profession is that because it is smaller, it is more responsive to trying new things,≤ she explained.
≥For me, this has been the ideal position. I am able to teach and I am able to do some clinical work, but not so much that I get mired in it and canπt concentrate on the research,≤ she added.
When Dr. Taylor is in East Lansing, she teaches Clinical Tropical Medicine (IM618) and typically returns to Malawi in early December.
During the six months she is in Africa, Dr. Taylor supervises students from MSUCOM, and other medical schools as they complete rotations in tropical medicine.
≥Itπs neat,≤ she said. ≥I feel as if they are exposed to a whole new type of medical practice.≤
Last year, rather than heading off to Malawi, Dr. Taylor headed to Harvard University, where she spent five months on sabbatical at the Harvard School of Public Health in the Departments of Biostatistics and of Tropical Public Health. She was both a biostatistics student and helped teach a course on the ≥Biology, Epidemiology, Ecology and Policies of Malaria.≤
After her stay at Harvard, she was asked to served as an adviser for an NIH- funded malaria project in Bangkok where she spent two weeks helping to develop a protocol to evaluate a new adjunct therapy for malaria.
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