Spring Break
New anti-malaria drug is promising in early tests
Issue date: 3/13/08
Every 30 seconds a child in Africa dies of malaria, according to the World Health Organization, and between one and two million people die from this disease around the world every year, said Gary Posner, professor of chemistry in the School of Arts and Sciences.
Posner and others at Hopkins, including colleagues from the School of Medicine and the Bloomberg School of Public Health, recently published a paper in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association that explains their development of a new anti-malarial drug.
The drug has stirred excitement because it has a 100 percent success rate in curing malaria when given orally to infected mice.
"We hoped to find a safe and efficacious cure for people who have malaria. We have succeeded through the stage of testing on rodents," Posner said.
While preventive strategies like insecticide-treated bed nets are effective in slowing the transmission of malaria, they are not available in some areas where malaria is prevalent.
Furthermore, as of yet there is no vaccine for the disease. As a result, many people don't have protection against the mosquitoes that transmit malaria, and so hundreds of millions of people are currently infected.
Formerly common drugs like quinine, the oldest anti-malarial, and others of the same class called alkaloids, are becoming increasingly ineffective as the parasite becomes resistant, according to the World Health Organization's (WHO's) Guidelines.
As a result, WHO is recommending combination drug therapies. According to WHO's Guidelines, certain combination therapies have been shown to reduce the number of parasites in an individual infected with malaria at a much higher rate than other kinds of anti-malarial drugs.
Posner's lab used chemicals derived from trioxane artemisinin, a chemical ingredient often found in Chinese herbal remedies, paired with an alkaloidal drug. The approach is called artemisinin combination therapy.
Posner and others at Hopkins, including colleagues from the School of Medicine and the Bloomberg School of Public Health, recently published a paper in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association that explains their development of a new anti-malarial drug.
The drug has stirred excitement because it has a 100 percent success rate in curing malaria when given orally to infected mice.
"We hoped to find a safe and efficacious cure for people who have malaria. We have succeeded through the stage of testing on rodents," Posner said.
While preventive strategies like insecticide-treated bed nets are effective in slowing the transmission of malaria, they are not available in some areas where malaria is prevalent.
Furthermore, as of yet there is no vaccine for the disease. As a result, many people don't have protection against the mosquitoes that transmit malaria, and so hundreds of millions of people are currently infected.
Formerly common drugs like quinine, the oldest anti-malarial, and others of the same class called alkaloids, are becoming increasingly ineffective as the parasite becomes resistant, according to the World Health Organization's (WHO's) Guidelines.
As a result, WHO is recommending combination drug therapies. According to WHO's Guidelines, certain combination therapies have been shown to reduce the number of parasites in an individual infected with malaria at a much higher rate than other kinds of anti-malarial drugs.
Posner's lab used chemicals derived from trioxane artemisinin, a chemical ingredient often found in Chinese herbal remedies, paired with an alkaloidal drug. The approach is called artemisinin combination therapy.
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