This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Scientists hunting for a new malaria treatment may have found a solution within a historical natural compound collection housed at The Herbert Wertheim UF Scripps Institute for Biomedical Innovation & Technology. Globally, malaria remains one of the most widespread and deadly infectious diseases, sickening an estimated 280 million people annually.
It disproportionately kills small children, with about 600,000 deaths every year. Spread through biting mosquitoes in tropical areas, malaria parasites are growing resistant to standard therapies such as chloroquine and artemisinin. "The parasites are evolving, so it's critically important to identify new antimalarial drugs that have mechanisms of action that differ from past drugs," said chemist Ben Shen, Ph.D., founder of the Natural Products Discovery Center at The Wertheim UF Scripps Institute.
"The compounds we identified originated in soil microbes and extracts housed within our natural products collection." The team discovered several compounds capable of rapidly killing the malaria parasite at all stages of its life cycle, unlike existing antimalarial drugs, Shen said. Co-first author Chantal Bader, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher in Shen's lab, said the team used a systematic process to find the best candidates from a subset of the 122,550-strain collection, seeking compounds that had not been studied before. "Bacterial extracts contain thousands of different metabolites.
The challenge is to find an active extract, to identify which specific metabolites in these complex mixtures are responsible for the activity, and then to confirm they are truly novel," Bader said. The researchers started their quest by screening 81 purified natural compounds selected from the institute's collection. Their target was a drug-resistant malaria parasite known to cause severe disease.
That step revealed six promising candidates from five chemical families. Then they expanded their screening to 1,531 samples created by 425 microbes, a group of bacteria called Actinobacteria. Of those, they found about 20% had antimalarial properties.
Filtering out those toxic to humans, they then studied the top candidates' chemical composition and activity. That revealed several compounds that had not previously been studied by scientists. The researchers then cultured the bacteria that produced the novel compounds.
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