Date of Award

January 2026

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Degree Name

Medical Doctor (MD)

Department

Medicine

First Advisor

Sunil Parikh

Abstract

Artemisinin derivatives form the backbone of all antimalarial combination therapies usedworld-wide. Resistance to this critical drug class is a growing problem in the highest malaria transmission regions of the world. First detected in southeast Asia, independent mutations conferring partial resistance to artemisinin’s have now emerged in East Africa.27, 32 Retrospectively, these mutations have been detected as early as 2016 in Uganda.36 Previous work by the Parikh lab highlights the efficacy of 3-day vs 5-day artemether-lumefantrine treatment regimen for uncomplicated malarial episodes in Busia, Uganda in 2019.41 Infections were followed and classified as recrudescent, a reinfection, SBP1 slow clearing, or an adequate clinical and parasitological response. Next generation deep amplicon sequencing will be used on parasite DNA extracted from these samples to investigate the prevalence of the k13 mutation. It is hypothesized that SBP1 slow clearing and recrudescent infections have a higher prevalence of k13 mutations. Library preparation is complete and we are awaiting sequencing results. Through this work we hope to further characterize the growing pattern of resistance and its timeline.

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This is an Open Access Thesis.

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