Kelch markers toolkit

Parasite resistance to drugs for treating malaria threatens global malaria elimination goals. For example, mutations in the Plasmodium falciparum Kelch 13 protein are associated with artemisinin resistance which first emerged in Southeast Asia and is now likely to spread within Africa. Read more about WWARN’s work to track resistance using the kelch 13 gene.

It is essential to have tools that can help track this phenomenon's evolution geographically and overtime to inform local, regional, and global policymakers.

The kelch markers toolkit, produced by scientists from WWARN, Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU) and the University of Cape Town (UCT), can be used to assess minimal essential information from studies evaluating malaria kelch 13 markers that make them suitable for pooling with other such data.

The tool consists of four excel sheets: information about the tool (P1-About), the tool itself - fields to complete about the study data (P2-Tool), the variables’ meta-data (P3-Variables) and further instructions (P4-Instructions). Download the tool.

Read the full paper, Mapping genetic markers of artemisinin resistance in Plasmodium falciparum malaria in Asia: a systematic review and spatiotemporal analysis.

For further information about the toolkit or contributing molecular markers of resistance data to WWARN, please contact info@wwarn.org.

Figure: Distribution of the prevalence of K13 markers and the year of the most recent sample collection for each administrative unit. All molecular markers in that year were aggregated in each administrative unit level 1 (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Iran, Malaysia, Nepal, Thailand, Viet Nam and Yemen) and administrative level 2 for China, India, and Pakistan and Myanmar. 'Validated' and 'associated' markers were only found in India, GMS and Papua New Guinea.