The largest study to date of the genetic makeup of parasitic worms has found hundreds of new clues about how they invade the human body, evade its immune system and cause disease.
The results point to potential deworming treatments to help fight some of the most neglected tropical diseases — including river blindness, schistosomiasis and hookworm disease — which affect around one billion people worldwide.
"Parasitic worms are some of our oldest foes and have evolved over millions of years to be expert manipulators of the human immune system," said Makedonka Mitreva of Washington University's McDonnell Genome Institute, who co-led the work with colleagues from Britain's Wellcome Sanger Institute and Edinburgh University.