Promising new one-dose malaria drug discovered

Single dosis only ?

"We're very excited by the new compound," said study author Elizabeth Winzeler, a professor at the Scripps Research Institute and member of the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation.

"It has a lot of encouraging features as a drug candidate, including an attractive safety profile and potential treatment in a single oral dose."

Current treatment methods require patients to take drugs between one and four times daily for three to seven days. Reducing the treatment to a single dose leaves less opportunity for the parasites to develop a resistance to the drug, researchers said.

"Malaria remains a scourge," said Mark Fishman, president, Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research.

The compound, dubbed NITD609,

was developed through a partnership involving the pharmaceutical giant Novartis, several non-profit organizations, US and Singapore government agencies and researchers at universities in the United States, Switzerland, Thailand, and Great Britain.

source: france24.com/en

Wall Street Journal - ‎Sep 4, 2010‎ online.wsj.com

An international team of scientists has identified a promising drug candidate that represents an entirely new class of medicines to treat malaria, one of the biggest killers in the developing world.

Resistance: artemisinin outdated.....

There are worrying signs that the malaria parasite in parts of Southeast Asia is becoming resistant to artemisinin, which is the mainstay of combination therapy for as many as 100 million patients world-wide.

Plasmodium falciparum,

the deadliest malaria parasite

When malarial parasites infect people, they spend part of their life cycle in the blood and part of it in the liver

Mouse survived Malaria

A mouse with malaria usually dies within a week. But when NITD609 was orally given to five infected mice, they were cured with no side effects.