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Anti-malarial Drug Development Target Revealed

by priya on Jan 31 2009 3:31 PM

In a bid to combat malaria, scientists have made Plasmodium falciparum, one of the deadliest strains of malaria, to reveal its weak-links that could act as potential drug targets.

By doing that, scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis could unambiguously show that the parasite relies heavily on a one-of-a-kind protein that it only makes in small quantities.

And both the findings could make the protein an attractive drug development target.

"The protein in question, which we're calling Pcalp, belongs to a class of cutting proteins known as proteases, which also are good drug targets generally. There's already quite a bit of knowledge available about how we can inhibit such proteins, spurred in part by the effort to develop drugs to combat HIV," said senior author Daniel E. Goldberg, M.D., Ph.D.

The researchers focussed on Pcalp because it's the parasite's only calpain, a specialized form of protease. Humans, in contrast, have more than a dozen calpains.

As the parasite makes so little Pcalp during the stage of its lifecycle that takes place in human blood, lead author Ilaria Russo, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow, had to develop special techniques just to detect it.

"When we first talked about Pcalp, the low levels we reported had people skeptical that it could do much at all during human infection. They suggested that Pcalp had to be more important to malaria during other stages in its lifecycle, such as the one that takes place in mosquitoes," said Goldberg.

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Russo made use of microorganisms' natural ability to genetically re-engineer themselves using mobile bits of DNA called plasmids and created multiple copies of two plasmids: one with a slightly altered but still functional version of Pcalp, and another with a copy of Pcalp mutated so that it could not work correctly.

While the parasite could incorporate the first version of Pcalp, researchers found evidence that it avoided stitching the second, defective version into its DNA.

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This showed that Pcalp is essential to the malaria parasite, according to Goldberg.

When Russo adapted a system previously only used in higher organisms to let her increase or decrease levels of Pcalp available to the parasite, she found evidence that it needs the Pcalp protein to progress through its normal cell cycle.

The study is published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Source-ANI
PRI/SK


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