Building A Biological Database

Overview

Africa has suffered and is still suffering from the adverse socio-economic effects of malaria caused mostly by Plasmodium falciparum. The popular treatment to malaria is chloroquine, which has become largely in effective as the parasite has grown resistance to it. Therefore, there is a huge need to discover and validate new drug or vaccine targets to enable the development of new treatments for malaria. Genomics has the promise of ushering new generation of drugs and possibly vaccines. In-silico analysis has recently been a useful tool in helping life science to speed-up drug and vaccine discovery pipeline. In this work we have built a publicly accessible database, afriPFdb, developed mostly with computational data derived from in-silico tools. We hope that the results that will be obtained from our data will drive work in malaria research and quicken the discovery pipeline of drugs and vaccines.