BioCentury
ARTICLE | Targets & Mechanisms

New fronts against malaria

April 23, 2009 7:00 AM UTC

A key challenge in combating malaria is the rapid development of resistance that Plasmodium falciparum parasites mount against older drugs. Now, a pair of articles describes two new ways to attack the infection: inhibiting host calpain activity and inhibitingthe parasite's Sir2 histone deacetylases.1,2 However, precisely targeting only the calpain of interest could be difficult, whereas compounds against Sir2 would need to be species specific.

In a paper published in Science, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues reported that inhibition of calpain 1 (CAPN1) in cultured human erythrocytes blocked P. falciparum parasites from escaping infected cells, thus preventing the parasites from proliferating.1...