Vivax Surveyor featured in International Journal for Parasitology

The WWARN Vivax Surveyor, provides an interactive map summarising the prevalence and degree of chloroquine resistance in Plasmodium vivax parasites around the world. The surveyor was recently featured in the International Journal for Parasitology: Drugs and Drug Resistance in an article entitled ‘The Vivax Surveyor: online mapping database for Plasmodium vivax clinical trials’. The paper highlights a collection of data from 230 clinical trials published since 1960 which have been collated to examine the clinical response to P. vivax treatment.

The surveyor allows the user to visualise the locations of published trials, review different treatment regimens and identify areas with evidence of reduced chloroquine efficacy against P. vivax.

"Considering the historically greater focus on Plasmodium falciparum, we hope this new surveyor will bring additional attention to vivax," said Dr Robert Commons, a researcher at the Menzies School of Health at Charles Darwin University in Australia and co-author of the article.

Although extensive research efforts over the last 20 years have greatly improved our understanding of drug-resistant P. falciparum parasites, resistance among the parasites that cause the persistent and debilitating form of malaria from P. vivax remains poorly understood. Current estimates of the global burden of P. vivax infection vary considerably, but range between 13 to more than 100 million clinical cases each year. Although chloroquine remains the recommended treatment for P. vivax malaria infection in most vivax endemic countries, several countries have been forced to abandon chloroquine due to the emergence of high numbers of parasites resistant to the drug. This threat to established antimalarial policy poses new challenges to the scientific community.

“The Vivax Surveyor provides the research community with the most comprehensive picture to date of the spatio-temporal trends of chloroquine resistance in P. vivax parasites throughout the world,” said Professor Ric Price, Head of the WWARN Clinical Group, and a co-author of the paper. “This interactive tool will help to highlight where and how we need to focus our efforts to understand the spread and emergence of chloroquine resistant vivax malaria parasites.”

The colour coded pins and the use of filters provide a quick summary of the areas where chloroquine resistant P. vivax parasites have been reported, and allows the output from individual studies to be compared at a glance across the world. Studies can be sorted into anti-relapse clinical trials, blood stage clinical trials or case reports, as well as by year of publication, study size, country undertaken, level of evidence for chloroquine resistance and treatments given. Full details of the methodology, including the categorisation of data according to the strength of evidence for chloroquine resistance, are available within the Surveyor tool.

Publication details:

Commons, RJ et al. (2017). “The Vivax Surveyor: online mapping database for Plasmodium vivax clinical trials.” International Journal for Parasitology: Drugs and Drug Resistance. Volume 7, Issue 2, 2017, Pages 181–190. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpddr.2017.03.003