Dundee University researchers are hoping they may have found a new treatment for one of the world’s deadliest diseases.
Every year around 200 million people suffer from malaria, with more than 600,000 dying. Children aged under five and pregnant women are especially at risk and the World Health Organisation estimates that a child dies of malaria every 30 seconds.
The parasite that causes the disease is developing resistance to drugs, making urgent the need for new medicines to be developed.
Scientists in the university’s drug discovery unit have come up with a compound that is about to enter preclinical development a vital step before it can begin to be tested on humans.
This follows a recommendation from the expert scientific advisory committee of the Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV), a Swiss-based, not-for-profit foundation that works with the public and private sectors to tackle the disease.
Professor Ian Gilbert, chair of medicinal chemistry at Dundee and one of the project leaders, said: “This compound has impressive anti-malarial properties.
“It has potential for a single-dose treatment of malaria. It also has the possibility to protect people from getting malaria in the first place and in stopping it spreading.”
The project began when one of the unit’s collections of compounds was screened against the parasite that causes malaria. This process identified a start point for a drug discovery programme.
This led to cycles of design, synthesis and testing by expert teams of chemists and biologists, resulting in the discovery of this new antimalarial compound.
Project co-leader Dr Kevin Read said: “We are very excited by this compound which belongs to a different chemical class to current anti-malarial drugs. This compound will now undergo scale-up and further safety testing with a view to it entering human clinical trials within the next 18 months.”
The Medicines for Malaria Venture is hoping to find anti-malaria drugs that are effective, well-tolerated by patients and also affordable, as the disease mostly affects poor nations.
Dr Paul Willis, one of MMV’s project directors, praised the work of the Dundee scientists.
“Identifying a compound like this is no small feat. It’s a great achievement, particularly given the exciting properties of the compound, which give it potential for use in the treatment, prevention and transmission-blocking of malaria,” he said.