Researcher teams performed a screen of soil bacteria extracts for antimalarials and identified an extremely potent inhibitor of malaria development. This breakthrough is published in
.
Drug resistance in malaria is becoming a huge problem, and climate change is pushing malaria-carrying mosquitoes to new places, broadening the disease’s spread.
The World Health Organization estimates that malaria was responsible for more than 400,000 deaths and 229 million infections in 2019 alone.
The family of compounds under study called duocarmycins is known to kill malaria and cancer cells for some time; however, they are extremely toxic to humans.
Using them as treatment comes with considerable collateral damage, which has resulted in many failed clinical trials and so these compounds are called anti-life.
However, PDE-I2, the new compound molecule discovered appears to come with all of the potent malaria-killing properties of previously known duocarmycins without the adverse effects.
Since then, the research team would assay them against malaria parasites at the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine. It was years of trial-and-error before the researchers finally fractionated the right molecule.
This novel compound represents a useful scaffold for anti-malaria therapy and researchers are excited to explore its efficiency in systemic infections and to pinpoint its mode of action.
Source: Medindia
