A new antimalarial drug that is more chemically stable in the body that current malaria treatments, has been developed by researchers at the University of Liverpool and the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.
This research is part of a £1.5 million project and scientists are now looking for a way of getting it to clinical trials.
The “miracle” drug is made out of simple organic molecules and it will be much cheaper to mass produce, compared with current therapies; it can also be taken orally and it is more powerful than naturally derived artemisinin.
Artemisinin and its derivatives are a group of drugs that are the most efficient and have the most rapid action of all current drugs against malaria. It interacts with a substance inside parasite-infected red blood cells and causes a chain reaction that destroys the disease.
The current treatment is difficult to mass produce and can be rather chemically unstable in the body, so researchers have now found a way of producing synthetically the most reactive part of artemisinin and stabilizing it by combining it with a cage-like structure made of organic molecules.
As the new chemical structure is more stable within the body, the drug lasts longer, thus reducing the chances of the parasite reappearing.
Malaria is the most deadly parasitic infection in the world, provoking nearly one million deaths a year.
It “affects the world’s poorest countries and hospitals are unable to afford expensive treatments,” says professor Paul O’Neill, from the University’s Department of Chemistry.
“The problem with current artemisinin-based therapies is their limited availability, poor oral absorption and high cost [thus] we have created a new drug that is easily absorbed by the body, chemically stable and highly potent, made from very simple organic materials and therefore will be more cost-effective to mass produce than current therapies.”
The base for this new antimalarial drug is an extract of a Chinese herb commonly used in malaria treatment.
The research, funded by the European Commission was published in Angewandte Chemie Int Ed.
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