BioCentury
ARTICLE | Cover Story

New Area in Malaria

June 26, 2008 7:00 AM UTC

Development of malaria therapeutics has been stymied by poor understanding of drug targets and limited corporate interest in picking up preclinical compounds with therapeutic promise. At the same time, the parasite has shown mounting resistance to older drugs, making drugs against new targets ever more urgent.

Now, a trio of articles describes a range of drug discovery approaches that may yield new types of antimalarial agents.1-3 The proof-of-principle compounds identified in the studies are not yet ready to enter the clinic, but they could serve as starting points for designing improved compounds using SAR analysis, according to the authors...