A One-Stop Novel Drug for Malaria Treatment and Control

Malaria is a primordial disease that has been affecting human race since their origin. Albeit the parasite shows parallel divergence with hominids, it has evolved so finely and shaped its genome to a great extent to invade, dodge and damage hosts defence system. Small generation time, pressure to survive and grow under adverse environmental conditions inside host, ability to disguise and escape host immune system; help the parasite to succeed the evolutionary arms race. Hence, malaria associated morbidity and mortality is a major public healthconcern especially for underdeveloped and developing countries of the globe.Though many malaria control and eradication strategies have been followed since ages, but none of them are successful in an overall control program. In the absence of a competent vaccine for malaria prevention and at the same time emerging resistance against currently available antimalarials, the ongoing malaria control programs have been severely hampered.

Besides that, cross resistance among drugs due to their alike chemical combination is also well evidenced . As a result of which, the current malaria control program has been adversely affected by the development and spread of parasite resistant strains to the working antimalarial, ACT (Artemisinin-based Combination Therapy). Therefore, the need of the hour is to develop a drug not only that has a quick and deep action in the parasite, but also by delaying the emergence of drug resistance. Bearing these facts in mind, Baragana and co-workers5 have recently designed a multiple stage antimalarial compound, which not only can treat malaria with single dose but also help in chemo-protection and blockage of transmission with less chance of development of resistance by the parasite.To initiate the process of development of such a compound, the scientific team  searched the chemical compound library at drug discovery unit (DDU) of University of Dundee that consists of around 4700 compounds and screened against blood stage asexual forms of the deadliest malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum 3D7 strain. Read more...........