Malaria Treatment Breakthrough
Malaria claims the life of one child every 30 seconds across the world. Drug-resistant malaria has also become a major problem. Finding ways to treat it have been a serious concern.
A team of Monash University researchers led by Professor James Whisstock has made a major breakthrough in the international fight against malaria, however that hopes to deal a blow to this baffling disease.
The research, performed in collaboration with Professor John Dalton at the University of Technology, Sydney, provides a new approach to treating and controlling the disease that is contracted by half a billion people and causes around 1 million deaths a year.
“About forty percent of the world’s population are at risk of contracting malaria. It is only early days but this discovery could one day provide treatment for some of those 2.5 billion people across the globe,” Professor Whisstock said.
The team, based at the Monash University ARC Centre of Excellence in Structural and Functional Microbial Genomics, has been able to deactivate the final stage of the malaria parasite’s digestive machinery, effectively starving the parasite of nutrients and disabling its survival mechanism. This process of starvation leads to the death of the parasite.
Professor Whisstock said the results had laid the scientific groundwork to further develop a specific class of drugs to treat the disease. Hopefully never having to pay off short term life insurance rates for those with the disease.
“We had an idea as to how malaria could be starved and we have shown this, chemically, can be done,” Dr McGowan said.
“A single bite from an infected mosquito can transfer the malaria parasite into a human’s blood stream. The malaria parasite must then break down blood proteins in order to obtain nutrients. Malaria carries out the first stages of digestion inside a specialised compartment called the digestive vacuole – this can be considered to be like a stomach. However, the enzyme we have studied (known as PfA-M1), which is essential for parasite viability, is located outside the digestive vacuole meaning that it is easier to target from a drug perspective.”
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Filed under: Science by JMH
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