Malaria: A promising discovery

The National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm) announced a breakthrough in the fight against malaria. This discovery was made by a team from Inserm and the Global Health Institute (Switzerland). Transmitted by certain species of mosquitoes, malaria affects about 250 million people worldwide and kills between one and three million.

Its mechanisms have been identified from the late 19th century, malaria has since been the subject of much research, but the parasite that causes the disease demonstrated a great ability to rapidly develop resistance to antimalarial drugs.

The researchers discovered a class of drugs used in the fight against cancer that also kills the parasite that causes malaria. These molecules, developed for cancer chemotherapy are known as inhibitors of kinases (enzymes that control the growth, survival and cell migration, and their deregulation).

Now researchers have realized that the evolution of the parasite is stopped after treatment of infected red blood cells with inhibitors targeting human kinases. The parasite can no longer proliferate and then die. The research was conducted on a type of malaria that affects rodents, both in liver cells (first stage of infection) than in red blood cells. They also showed that the period of use of inhibitors of human kinases necessary to treat malaria is shorter than in the case of cancer, which would mitigate the problem of toxicity.

Finally, several drugs used in chemotherapy and may be used to treat malaria have already passed steps 1 and 2 clinical trials to test the efficacy and toxicity of the molecules. They could therefore be implemented in the fight against malaria in a timely and cost nothing in common with those inherent in the creation of a new drug.

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