Australian scientists have developed a new method of malaria treatment, combating the way the malarial parasites cling to red blood cells. The team is claiming a major breakthrough in the battle against the killer disease in the process.
Image: Mosquito bite. Credit: James Jordan/flickr
Malaria kills an estimated three million people and affects millions more each year mainly in the wet, tropical regions of the planet. Previous anti-malarial treatments had involved attempting to disrupt the metabolism or biological function of the parasite which is injected into the human blood by infected mosquitoes.
However signs that the parasites were becoming resistant to such drugs demanded a new approach.
Researchers at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute (WEHI) have uncovered the process of how parasites hijack red blood cells using a "sticky sack" adhesion strategy and found how this method prevents the blood cells from being flushed through the spleen and the parasites destroyed by the body's immune system in the process.
Researchers found the transformed "sticky" red blood cells attach themselves to blood vessel walls and identified eight new proteins that promote the "stickiness" and found that removal of just one of these proteins disrupts this ability to cling to the blood cells.
"If we block the stickiness we essentially block the virulence or the capacity of the parasite to cause disease," Professor Alan Cowman from the Walter and Eliza Institute explained.
He told the ABC the research will lead to a new form of research into anti-malarial treatment.
"By identifying those proteins it means we have potentially new targets to really concentrate on to try and develop new drugs or new ways of trying to treat Malaria," he said.
"It also gives us the potential of trying to develop what are called genetically attenuated parasites, in other words weakened parasites that can no longer stick within the body and these could be used potentially as a live vaccine as has been done with many other things such as Hepatitis B."
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