World Malaria Day: Lighting Up Neglected Parasite Proteomes

World Malaria Day 2025 lands with a sober reminder: hundreds of thousands of lives are still lost each year, most in regions with the fewest research resources. This year’s theme — “Malaria ends with us: reinvest, reimagine, reignite” — resonates with how we work: collaborative, data-driven, and relentlessly open.

Here’s our contribution: April’s community sprint targets parasite proteomes relevant to vector-borne disease. Volunteers will annotate pockets and interfaces in enzyme families implicated in metabolism and immune evasion. We’re pairing these tasks with transparent data access (thanks to wwPDB and partner archives), including easier PDB archive snapshots so more classrooms and low-bandwidth contributors can participate.

Why it matters: when a student in Lagos or Lucknow flags a cryptic pocket on a conserved enzyme, that label can ripple outward: into docking triage lists, into assay shortlists, into actual lead compounds down the line. Neglected diseases aren’t neglected because they’re uninteresting; they’re neglected because they’ve lacked infrastructure. Community science is infrastructure.