Researchers from Imperial College London are taking a new tack in the battle against malaria, focusing on
the compounds that could prevent malaria parasites from being able to infect mosquitoes, halting the spread of disease.
As a disease delivery system, mosquitoes are infamous, but researchers have screened more than 70,000 compounds and identified six which could potentially be used to form drugs which would block them from picking up malaria parasites in the first place. In this way, the team believes they could end malaria as an individual battle – one which increases drug resistance – and instead take it large scale.
“Current antimalarial drugs can cure a person of the disease, but that person is still infectious to mosquitoes, and can therefore still cause someone else to become infected,” Jake Baum, professor of Life Sciences at Imperial and lead researcher on this effort, said. “What we propose is antimalarial drugs that protect mosquitoes, blocking the parasites from continuing their infectious journey. By combining such a drug with a conventional antimalarial, we not only cure the individual person, but protect the community as well.”
Adapting these compounds to future drugs comes with its own set of concerns. Because they couldn’t be given to mosquitoes directly, they would have to be given to humans, with the hope that mosquitoes would bite them. They have to be stable enough to survive the transfer to the new host.
The full findings of Baum’s team have been published in Nature Communications.