WPI Research is the research magazine of Worcester Polytechnic Institute. It contains news and features about graduate research in the arts and sciences, business, and engineering, along with notes about new grants, books, and faculty achievements.
Issue link: http://wpiresearch.epubxp.com/i/229254
> HARVESTING A SIMPLER, MORE EFFECTIVE TREATMENT FOR MALARIA IN MEDICINE AS IN LIFE, sometimes simpler is better. That's the philosophy that is driving the current research of Pamela Weathers, PhD, professor of biology and biotechnology at WPI. It's an approach that may produce a more economical and effective treatment for one of the most prevalent and deadly infectious diseases of the developing world: malaria. For more than a decade, Weathers has been working with a plant that produces a compound that is the only remaining effective treatment for malaria, a mosquito-borne parasitic infection that afficted nearly 220 million people in 2010, according to the CDC. The plant is Artemisia annua (commonly known as sweet annie or sweet wormwood), and the compound is artemisinin. The process of extracting artemisinin from the sweet annie plant, purifying it, and packaging it as a pharmaceutical (particularly when the compound is combined with other antimalarial drugs to make it less prone to resistance) is expensive, and the drug is frequently in short supply. In her recent research, Weathers has been exploring a novel way to turn the Artemisia annua plant, itself, into a medication, which would bypass the need for the costly extraction process and generate a number of other benefts. For example, using the dried leaves could greatly expand access to antimalarial therapy, Weathers says. "Artemisia can be grown readily in most climates," she says. "It is a relatively simple process to harvest the leaves, pulverize them, test samples for their potency, measure out doses, and put them in capsules or make tablets. This could become the basis for local businesses and would be a wonderful socioeconomic stimulus in developing countries." In addition to making a potent malaria treatment more widely available for a lower price, using the dried leaves may produce a treatment that does a better job of combating the malaria parasite than purifed artemisinin, as Weathers and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts reported recently in the Journal PLOS ONE. They found that powdered dried leaves from Artemisia annua delivered 40 times more artemisinin to the blood and reduced the level of parasite infection more completely in mice. The effectiveness of the dried leaves may be due, in part, to the presence in the leaves of other compounds, including some favonoids and monoterpenes, also known to have antimalarial abilities. This fall, Weathers ( far left) and her students harvested a new crop of Artemisia annua from a plot on a farm in Stow, Mass., and then hung it in a greenhouse to dry. The plant will become the raw material for ongoing work in the Weathers lab and will bring the dream of a powerful, cost-effective, widely available — and simple — malaria treatment closer to reality. Olinger's interest in kite power began when he came across papers from the 1970s that proposed using kites for electricity generation. He advised undergraduate project teams that developed a prototype system consisting of a large kite connected by a long tether to a rocking arm. The arm's up-and-down motion is transferred through a linkage to drive a simple water pump. The system is currently being tested at Heifer International's Heifer Farm in Rutland, Mass. Olinger says the low-cost system would be an ideal way to provide power to remote villages in developing countries. With NSF funds, Olinger and a team of graduate students have developed computational models that can predict trajectories and power output for kites of different sizes and kite tethers of different lengths. The models help design kites that can fy in stable, highspeed fgure-eight patterns under changing wind conditions. Those algorithms will now be applied to the design of kites that can "fy" in underwater currents. "Instead of moving air, you have moving water and the kites have rigid wings," Olinger says, "but the same physical principles apply." Olinger and his team will study the benefts of mounting turbinegenerators directly on kites vs. tethering the kites to a generator. After evaluating various designs in the computer, they will build scale models and test them in large water fumes at the Alden Research Laboratories, a renowned hydraulics research facility just north of the WPI campus. Whichever design works best, it will have important advantages over stationary marine turbines, which have been used on a limited scale in Europe, Asia, and North America to generate power from tides. For one, the generators can be smaller, since with the fgureeight motion the kite will move faster than the current, greatly amplifying its power output. The kites can be attached to foating platforms, making them cheaper to install than bottom-mounted turbines and easier to retrieve for maintenance. As the world looks for new ways to wean itself from fossil fuels, a new answer may be emerging: go fy a kite! Worcester Polytechnic Institute > 7