Advances in Antimalarial Drug Evaluation and New Targets for Antimalarials

Parasitic infections due to the protozoa Plasmodium are responsible for malaria, a severe disease that still caused about 225 million cases and 781,000 human deaths in 2009, despite the efforts developed during the last decade to fight this disease (Alonso et al., 2011). The international funding allocated to antimalarial strategies has increased regularly since 2003 from about 0.3 billions to 1.7 billion dollars in 2009 (Collier, 2009), allowing many countries to undertake or strengthen effective fights against the parasite, the disease and the vectors. Nonetheless, more than half of the world population still lives in area where there is a risk of malaria transmission. The difficulty in fighting malaria is that five species of Plasmodium, namely P. ovale, P. malariae, P. vivax, P. falciparum and P. knowlesi (until recently considered as a nonhuman primate parasite) transmitted by over 30 species of Anopheles female mosquitoes are known to cause human malaria. The most virulent, P. falciparum, is responsible for severe clinical malaria and death. Furthermore, an increasing prevalence of resistance of vectors to insecticides, and of parasites to the standard antimalarial drugs has been observed for decades.