Continuous In-vitro Cultivation of the Human Malaria Parasite

Excerpt

Sometimes an advance in biomedical research deserves to be highlighted in a clinical journal even though the work does not have immediate application to the practice of medicine. One such advance was the continuous in-vitro cultivation of the asexual stages of Plasmodium falciparum in erythrocytes by Trager and Jensen (1). Bass and Johns (2) first attempted this in 1912 and were able to maintain the parasite through three cycles (6 days). They predicted that within a year their methods would be obsolete and the parasite would be growing continuously in culture. Like the long search by Howard Carter and Lord