Ateam of researchers has just identified more than 10,000 moleculeswith which new drugs could be developed againstmalaria, a disease caused by a parasite that is transmitted to people through the bite of infected mosquitoes and that in 2009 caused one million deaths.
The study, which occupies the cover of the magazineNature, was carried out at the GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) laboratories in Tres Cantos (Madrid). These investigations are based on thescreening, for more than a year, of the more than 2 million compoundsfrom the GSK collection, in order to identify those that couldinhibit the malaria parasite,Plasmodium falciparum. The article ofNaturedescribes the structures andanalysis of the more than 13,500 most potent compounds.
Among the compounds with a previously known mechanism of action, the most numerous are thekinase inhibitors. The authors suggest that these compounds open the door to innovative therapeutic strategies against malaria. The study has also identified compounds that can inhibit processes in red blood cells necessary for the parasite’s survival. This opens up a new possibility of fighting infection by seeking to interrupt these processes in red blood cells, instead of directly inhibiting the malaria parasite itself.
From today,the 13,533 “hits” are available on public websitesThis being the first time that a pharmaceutical company has made the structures of so many compounds available to the public. Specifically, these chemical structures can be consulted online at theEuropean Bioinformatics Institute(EMBL-EBI), enCollaborative Drug Discovery(CDD) and inPubChem (National Library of Medicine). “Along with the data and analysis published inNature, the global research community now has at its disposalTens of thousands of chemical tools to support your research on this deadly disease that kills a child in Africa every 30 secondss, “say the study authors.
