UCSD team offers access to newly identified antimalaria leads
A University of California San Diego team has published openly 631 antimalaria compounds identified through a screening campaign, offering the potential building blocks of a chemical vaccine that targets malaria in the early stages of infection. All 538,273 screened compounds are built from commercially available chemical scaffolds, giving vaccine developers quick access to the fresh leads.
Most commercial antimalarials, such as artemisinin-based combination therapies, target asexual malaria in the bloodstream; however, these interventions do not remove dormant parasites in the liver that can cause disease recurrence. Additionally, resistance to artemisinin-based combination therapies is rising, the UCSD authors wrote in a study published Thursday in Science. Liver-stage prophylactics could reduce parasites in the liver and circumvent the appearance of resistance mutations by reducing the number of parasites exposed to the drug...