Malaria Vaccine Breakthrough: Brown Alpert Medical School Professor Joins “Smart Health”
Wednesday, August 07, 2019
Dr. Jonathan “Jake” Kurtis, a Rhode Island native and Professor at the Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University, will join “Smart Health” Wednesday at 4 p.m. on GoLocal LIVE, where he will talk about developing a vaccine for malaria — right here in Rhode Island — that has the potential to save millions of lives.
Kurtis will speak to the vaccine being currently in clinical trials in Kenya, and how a trip to the country during his junior year at Brown — and brush with malaria that nearly took his life — played a pivotal role in his decision to work to find a vaccine for the mosquito-borne infectious disease.
Though it has been eliminated from Western Europe since the 1930s and the US since the 1950s, malaria still threatens almost half the world’s population. The World Health Organization estimates that in 2012, 637,000 people died of malaria, 482,000 of them children.
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Kurtis is the Stanley M. Aronson Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Chair of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. He received his BA in geology/biology from Brown University, his PhD in molecular parasitolgy from Brown University and his MD from Brown University.
Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Walter Reed Army Institute in Kenya, where he studied malaria vaccine development, Kurtis did his residency in clinical pathology and his fellowship in transfusion medicine, both at the University of Pennsylvania. He returned to Brown in 2000 as an assistant professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine—the department he now chairs.
Since granting its first Doctor of Medicine degrees in 1975, the Warren Alpert Medical School has become a national leader in medical education and biomedical research. By attracting first-class physicians and researchers to Rhode Island over the past four decades, the Medical School and its seven affiliated teaching hospitals have radically improved the state's health care environment, from health care policy to patient care.
Smart Health is a sponsored content series by the Brown Warren Alpert Medical School and GoLocalProv.
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