Once the T. parva parasite is decoded, researchers believe they will also be in a better position to understand the parasite that causes malaria. The East Coast fever and malarial parasites share certain basic features. Both are transmitted by blood sucking animals, for example, and both invade a mammalian host blood cell rather than remain in the bloodstream. More than a million people die each year of malaria, principally children in Sub-Saharan Africa. For instance, if scientists identify vaccine antigens against the East Coast fever parasite, they can then look for similar proteins in the malarial parasite.
Scientists also plan to use the parasite code to understand cancer biology.
When East Coast fever strikes, instructions are sent by the cattle parasite causing the cow's cells to divide indefinitely. Knowledge of the genes that the parasite uses to start this lethal cell division may shed light on the mechanisms that causes human tumors to grow. Research on the East Coast fever parasite has already led to the identification of a previously unknown mechanism that causes leukemia in mice. The U.S.-based Institute for Genomic Research is a nonprofit research institute founded in 1992. It has interests in structural, functional and comparative analysis of genomes and gene products in viruses, bacteria, plants and animals.