New breaches for them beaches umma follow me some peaches, where them yonders bellows a fine man and them fellows stand a tall where the horses sound their running call...
Yi ha!!!!
Good is the watcher in the liquer store...
Scientists closer to malaria cure
Scientists have cured malaria in mice with a single dose of a new drug, the journal Science reports on Friday.
The drug, NITD609, has a new mechanism of action and shows great promise as a treatment for drug-resistant malaria, according to researchers. They say it is effective against the two most common parasites that cause the disease, including the most dangerous, Plasmodium falciparum.
ON THIS STORY
- Michael Skapinker Employers need help with mentally ill
- Combating disease A stretched safety net
- Carter Centre calls for wider immunisation programme
- Global health fund plans radical shake-up
- Interactive Mapping non-communicable disease risks
IN GLOBAL ECONOMY
“The ideal new malaria drug would not just be a modification of existing drugs, but would have entirely novel features and mechanisms of action. NITD609 does,” said Elizabeth Winzeler of the Scripps Research Institute in California, who helped discover the drug.
The compound was identified by an international collaboration of scientists working in a public-private partnership including Novartis, the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, and Scripps.
“We’re very excited by the new compound. It has a lot of encouraging features as a drug candidate, including an attractive safety profile and potential treatment in a single oral dose,” said Dr Winzeler. It is also amenable to large-scale manufacturing.
“A single dose cure would go a long way to addressing the unmet medical need in malaria, and we look forward to seeing how this compound performs in clinical trials,” said Rick Davis of the Wellcome Trust, which also funded the work.
The drug was identified as a “hit” after using a robotic screening technique to look for anti-malarial activity in 12,000 different chemicals.
The scientists leading the study used an old-fashioned approach, screening the activity of the drug against whole parasites, rather than the more recently favoured process of using genome data to identify molecular targets.
The discovery has taken less than three years to go from screening to a viable candidate drug for preclinical trials. “That is a turbocharged pace,” said Tim Wells, chief scientist at Medicines for Malaria Venture, writing in Science.
The compound is particularly promising because it is active against parasites resistant to other anti-malarials. Researchers in Cambodia have reported resistance to artemisinin, the best current treatment.
“Malaria remains a scourge,” said Mark Fishman of the Novartis Institute for BioMedical Research. “The parasite has demonstrated a frustrating ability to outwit new medicines, from quinine to today’s unsettling increased tolerance to artemisinin derivatives.”
To learn how the malaria parasite might develop resistance to NITD609, researchers exposed parasites to low levels continuously over several months, to force the development of resistance. They then analysed the newly evolved parasites and discovered that the resistance results from a change in one of the parasite’s genes. Tests also show that the malaria parasite is slow to develop resistance to the new compound.
Further tests in animals are under way and NITD609 could enter early safety tests in humans later this year.
According to World Health Organisation estimates, there are 240m cases of malaria and more than 800,000 deaths from the disease every year.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfIXs2ZMxDU...
