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The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 270 No 7253 p820
14 June 2003

News summary | R & D summary

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Nature Medicine abstract (more)
PNAS: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online (www.pnas.org)

Malaria parasite targeted through sugar transport

A new way of killing the malaria parasite has been developed by researchers at St George's Hospital medical school, London, and a French research institute, following the investigations of Professor Sanjeev Krishna and colleagues into the glucose requirements of the parasite.

Plasmodium falciparum needs glucose to grow and multiply in red blood cells. It uses a special transport protein — a parasite-encoded faciliatative hexose transporter (PfHT) — to absorb the glucose around it. By introducing a new compound — an O-3 hexose derivative — the scientists prevent the parasite's sugar transport protein from working, an approach which kills even drug-resistant strains of the parasite.

Professor Krishna commented that the information gave the potential to design new antimalarial drugs (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online).

Immunity in humans In another new approach to malaria, Oxford University researchers have induced immunity against infection in human volunteers. In a "prime and boost" approach, they first treated the volunteers with the parasite's DNA, then boosted the response with a modified poxvirus that expressed parasite proteins. Each component contained distinctly different proteins. Neither DNA nor poxvirus in isolation induced a potent response, but the combination increased the activation of T-cells which provided partial protection against infection (Nature Medicine 2003;9:729).