UW Medicine expert is advancing malaria prevention, detection and treatment

Dr. Sean Murphy is a UW Medicine pathologist aiming to develop better vaccines, diagnostic tests and drug candidates for malaria. He is a clinical investigator at the Seattle Malaria Clinical Trials Center in Seattle. Among his efforts are to target the malaria parasite during the early liver stage of human infection to prevent progression to the disease-causing blood stage. He is also designing and evaluating new molecular diagnostics to detect malaria parasites in human blood specimens many days earlier than current tests.

Murphy, an M.D./Ph.D. physician scientist, is a professor or laboratory medicine and pathology at the University of Washington School of Medicine, assistant director of the Clinical Microbiology Lab at UW Medical Center, and director of the Malaria Molecular Diagnostic Laboratory at UW Medical Center.