Toxoplasmosis

Anita A Koshy

Associate Professor
Associate Professor, Immunobiology
Associate Professor, Evelyn F Mcknight Brain Institute
Associate Professor, Neuroscience - GIDP
Associate Professor, Medicine
Associate Professor, BIO5 Institute
Primary Department
Department Affiliations
Contact
(520) 626-1696

Work Summary

We study how a common intracellular parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, persists in, and potentially changes, the mammalian brain. Understanding the Toxoplasma-brain interaction offers the opportunity to develop better therapies to treat toxoplasmosis as well as giving new insights into how to manipulate the brain immune response which has been implicated in many neurodegenerative diseases.

Research Interest

Anita Koshy, MD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Neurology and the Department of Immunobiology, and an affiliate of the Clinical Translational Science Institute and the Evelyn F. McKnight Brain Institute. Clinically, Dr. Koshy is a recognized expert in the area of Infectious Diseases of the Nervous System, and has co-authored 4 chapters on this subject. Dr. Koshy’s lab focuses on understanding how a common human parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, is able to persist in the mammalian brain (including in up to 1/3 of the human population.) The goals of this work are to: 1) improve treatments for patients with symptomatic toxoplasmosis (there are no drugs to cure patients of Toxoplasma) and 2) use the co-evolution between the parasite and the mammalian CNS to better understand how immune responses in brain can be triggered and aborted. The latter research may have broad applicability to disorders of the brain in which the immune response is dysfunctional; these disorders include Multiple Sclerosis, traumatic brain injury, and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease. Keywords: Neuroscience, Infectious Disease, Parasitology