14 DAY TRIAL // The research collaboration between Bradford and Shanghai could find a new way of treating people suffering from malaria more efficiently and at much lower costs.
The best malaria treatment currently available is artemisinin, an active ingredient extracted from a plant found in China and Vietnam, but there is a growing need for a more efficient form of the drug.
There are several problems with artemisinin currently, the first on being that the active ingredient in only 1% of the plant and when taken in tablet form it is not very soluble, and only 20% of the drug in absorbed into the bloodstream.
The plant is also very fragile, being vulnerable to poor harvests, changing agricultural practices and natural disasters – the Sichuan earthquake devastated stocks back in 2008.
Now, scientists expert in drug design and delivery, from the University of Bradford are working with scientists from Jilin University and the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, on a new version of the drug that would contain more active ingredient and be more easily absorbed by the body.
The absorption rate is very important as now, drug doses are five times higher than what is needed, which means that the patients takes unnecessary medication that could raise the risk of side effects and it also rises the overall cost of the treatment.
Money is really an serious issue in developing countries where malaria is posing the biggest risk.
Professor Peter York, leader of the project at Bradford says that this “research is focusing on making the best and most effective use of the stocks of artemisinin that are available to us.
“We’ve worked in the past with other challenging drugs, so we believe we’re well placed to make an impact.”
He explained that “while other research groups are looking at modifying the plant or synthesizing the drug to overcome the problems of supply, we want to ensure we are able to create a medicine that works efficiently at minimum dosage, wherever the supply comes from.”
One of the team's missions is to obtain more active ingredient during the manufacturing, so the scientists will use a drug manufacturing process developed at Bradford, called the Super Critical Fluid (SCF) process.
This process is carried out at relatively low temperatures and is less harmful than conventional extraction methods, so larger amounts of high quality artemisinin should be retained.
The SCF studies will be carried out by CrystecPharma, a spin-out company from the University of Bradford’s Institute of Pharmaceutical Innovation, and its subsidiary based in Tianjin, China.
Another objective for the team is to ameliorate the rate of solution and absorption of artemisinin.
To do so through the SCF process, they will change the size and form of the drug particles and could add hydrophilic polymer into the drug particles.
Th funding for this project come from the RCUK through its Science Bridges program and from the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology.
Artemisinin was first extracted in the 1960s, at the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica.
Nearly half of the world's population (3.3 billion people) are at risk of malaria, and every year, there are about 250 million new cases out of which nearly one million people die, mainly in the developing world.