In light of current resistance to antimalarial drugs, there is a need to discover new classes of antimalarial agents with unique mechanisms of action. Identification of unique scaffolds from natural products with in vitro antiplasmodial activities may be the starting point for such new classes of antimalarial agents. We therefore conducted scaffold diversity and comparison analysis of natural p...

Malaria, a disease of poverty and high morbidity and mortality in the tropical world, has led to a worldwide search for control measures. To that end, good antimalarial chemotherapies have been difficult to find in the global market and those that seem to be most effective are rapidly becoming ineffective due to the emergence and spread of drug resistance. Artemisinin, a very effective yet expe...

Most countries in resource-poor, malaria-endemic areas lack current and comprehensive information on antimalarial drug efficacy, resulting in sub-optimal antimalarial treatment policies. Many African countries continue to use chloroquine despite very high rates of resistance, and others have changed policies based on limited data, with mixed success. Methods for measuring antimalarial drug effi...

Paul Ehrlich's dream of a 'magic bullet' that would specifically destroy invading microbes is now a major aspect of clinical medicine. However, a century later, the implementation of this medical holy grail continues being a challenge in three main fronts: identifying the right molecular or cellular targets for a particular disease, having a drug that is effective against it, and finding a stra...

BACKGROUND Antimalarial drugs are a powerful tool for malaria control and elimination. Artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs) can reduce transmission when widely distributed in a campaign setting. Modelling mass antimalarial campaigns can elucidate how to most effectively deploy drug-based interventions and quantitatively compare the effects of cure, prophylaxis, and transmission-blocki...

New primaquine conjugates 5-7 with glucosamine and two polymers of polyaspartamide type, poly[alpha,beta-(N-2-hydroxyethyl-DL-aspartamide)] (PHEA) and poly[alpha,beta-(N-3-hydroxypropyl-DL-aspartamide)] (PHPA), were synthesized, characterized and screened for their antimalarial activity. The conjugates differed in the type of covalent bonding, length of the spacer between the polymeric carrier ...

Plasmodium falciparum thioredoxin reductase (PfTrxR) has been identified as a potential drug target to combat growing antimalarial drug resistance. Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV) has pre-screened and identified a set of 400 antimalarial compounds called the Malaria Box. From those, we have evaluated their mechanisms of action through inhibition of PfTrxR and found new active chemical scaff...

The eight Northeastern (NE) states sharing a significant proportion of malaria cases reported in every year from India. Nowadays, several classes of antimalarial drugs like chloroquine, sulphadoxine-pyrimethamine, combination drugs artemisinin plus sulphadoxine-pyrimethamine etc. are used for treatment of malaria cases. In NE states, several research works are going on at molecular level for ev...

Digestion of hemoglobin in the food vacuole of the malaria parasite produces very high quantities of redox active toxic free heme. Hemozoin (β-hematin) formation is a unique process adopted by Plasmodium sp. to detoxify free heme. Hemozoin formation is a validated target for most of the well-known existing antimalarial drugs and considered to be a suitable target to develop new antimalarials. H...