Researchers identify new molecules which can malarial parasites rapidly

October 28, 2012

Researchers have discovered two new chemical compounds that can speedily kill the Plasmodium parasites that cause malaria.

Around 3 million deaths are caused by Malaria every year, and it is dominant in tropical regions of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

How this finding can help?

Although anti-malarial drugs are already available but there is need to develop more efficient drug to counter increasing resistance of Plasmodium parasite.
The newly identified treatment has been found so effective that it can kill 90% of the parasites in just 3 hours and all those tested in laboratory samples of infected human blood cells, within 12 hours.

How does it work?

These molecules interfere with an important stage of the parasite’s growth cycle and use this effect to kill them. They affect Plasmodium falciparum’s ability to carry out transcription (the biological process whereby the DNA sequence in a gene is copied into RNA).
These compounds kill the parasite during the long period of its complex life cycle while it resides in the blood-stream. This is an advancement over the majority of anti-malarial drugs, whose action is limited to shorter stages of Plasmodium’s life cycle.