Reuters :
South African scientists have discovered chemical compounds that could potentially be used for a new line of drugs to treat malaria and even kill the parasite in its infectious stage, which most available drugs do not.
The research led by the University of Pretoria, published in the Nature Communications journal this week, found that chemical compounds undergoing trials for the treatment of tuberculosis and cancer — the JmjC inhibitor ML324 and the antitubercular clinical candidate SQ109 — can kill the disease-causing parasite at a stage when it normally infects others.
The World Health Organisation said in November that deaths from malaria due to disruption during the coronavirus pandemic to services designed to tackle the mosquito-borne disease will far exceed those killed by COVID-19 in sub-Saharan Africa.
Malaria killed more than 400,000 people across the world in 2019, according to the latest WHO figures, all but a few thousand of them in Africa. There were 229 million cases across the world, 215 million of them on the continent.
“Our innovation was around finding compounds that are able to block the transmissible stages and we if we are able to do so then we stop the spread of malaria,” Research Chair in Sustainable Malaria Control and biochemistry professor Lyn-Marie Birkholtz, who was part of the team, told Reuters on Friday.
South African scientists have discovered chemical compounds that could potentially be used for a new line of drugs to treat malaria and even kill the parasite in its infectious stage, which most available drugs do not.
The research led by the University of Pretoria, published in the Nature Communications journal this week, found that chemical compounds undergoing trials for the treatment of tuberculosis and cancer — the JmjC inhibitor ML324 and the antitubercular clinical candidate SQ109 — can kill the disease-causing parasite at a stage when it normally infects others.
The World Health Organisation said in November that deaths from malaria due to disruption during the coronavirus pandemic to services designed to tackle the mosquito-borne disease will far exceed those killed by COVID-19 in sub-Saharan Africa.
Malaria killed more than 400,000 people across the world in 2019, according to the latest WHO figures, all but a few thousand of them in Africa. There were 229 million cases across the world, 215 million of them on the continent.
“Our innovation was around finding compounds that are able to block the transmissible stages and we if we are able to do so then we stop the spread of malaria,” Research Chair in Sustainable Malaria Control and biochemistry professor Lyn-Marie Birkholtz, who was part of the team, told Reuters on Friday.
