A research team has engineered a way to use human liver cells, derived from iPSCs, to screen potential antimalarial drugs for their ability to treat the liver stage malaria.

However, current methods for modeling liver-stage malaria in a dish are limited due to the small available pool of liver cells from human donors and the lack of genetic diversity of these donor cells. To overcome these hurdles, Bhatia and her research team reprogrammed human skin cells into iPSCs, embryonic-like stem cells capable of turning into other specific cell types relevant for studying a particular disease.
The researchers infected iPSC-derived liver cells with various malaria parasites to model liver-stage malaria in the laboratory. They found that these cells were sensitive to an antimalarial drug called atovaquone. Chemical maturation through exposure to small molecules also made the cells sensitive to another antimalarial drug called primaquine. Thus, they demonstrated the value of this approach for testing new antimalarial drugs.
Lead author Shengyong Ng said, "The use of iPSC-derived liver cells to model liver-stage malaria in a dish opens the door to study the influence of host genetics on antimalarial drug efficacy and lays the foundation for their use in antimalarial drug discovery."
The study is published in the journal of the International Society for Stem Cell Research.
Source-Medindia