Scientists inspired by marine sponges have developed a new antimalarial drug that is effective against drug-resistant strains of the deadly disease.
The American-led research team published details of their new drug and how it works in the prestigious journal Science this past week.
Malaria is spread by mosquitos carrying single-celled Plasmodium parasites. After a period of dormancy in the liver, the parasites invade red blood cells. Symptoms include fever and headache, and can lead to complications such as anaemia and organ failure.
The drug, named MED6-189, kills Plasmodium by disrupting two different cellular pathways. This two-pronged mechanism makes it much harder for the parasite to evolve resistance to MED6-189.
Drug-resistant malaria is one of the world’s most severe public health problems with the potential to impact nearly half the human population.
The deadliest Plasmodium species, P. falciparum, has evolved resistance to nearly all the current antimalarial drugs. This includes partial resistance to artemisinin, the main class of antimalarials used worldwide.
The research team based the design of their new antimalarial on naturally occurring compounds extracted from marine sponges.
“Many of the best antimalarial agents are natural products, or are derived from them,” says co-author Christopher Vanderwal, a professor of chemistry and pharmaceutical science at UC Irvine in the USA. “For example, artemisinin [was] initially isolated from the sweet wormwood plant.”
To test the drug’s efficacy in living animals, a collaborating Spanish pharmaceutical company, GSK, gave MED6-189 to mice infected with P. falciparum. The drug cleared the parasite from the mice. (The mice were engineered to have human red blood cells).
A collaborating lab at Yale University in the US, tested MED6-189 in monkeys which were also cleared of the disease, suggesting that MED6-189 could be effective against all species and strains of Plasmodium.
In 2022, about 247 million people contracted malaria and about 619,000 people died of it. Most of these deaths were young children in sub-Saharan Africa. Many other biological control measures are being tested to address this public health crisis.
