Malaria is most dangerous to children under five, pregnant women, travellers, and people who are immunocompromised, such as people with HIV or AIDS. Image source: Owen Strickland, via Wikimedia Commons
Researchers in Canberra and Germany have studied malaria-causing parasites and found that they can be tricked into consuming anti-malarial medications through the addition of cholesterol-like chemicals.
Malaria is a disease caused by parasites that are transmitted to people through the bites of infected female Anopheles mosquitoes. There are five species of parasites that infect humans.
These parasites are unable to produce their own cholesterol and must source it from host animals, which researchers have found can be used against the disease.
Called the “Trojan Horse” method, researchers attached chemicals that resembled cholesterol to existing malaria treatments so the parasites would consume them.
This method was created by the researchers at the Australian National University in Canberra and Humboldt University of Berlin.
Professor Alex Maier, lead researcher on the project, stated the method was three to 25 times more effective at eliminating parasites compared to malaria treatments that lacked cholesterol-like chemicals.
Maier further explained that “existing drugs used to treat malaria are taken up passively by the parasite, meaning they’re not as effective as they could be”.
“By attaching the drugs to cholesterol, the parasite actively latches onto and eats the cholesterol. This allows us to smuggle drugs into optimal killing zones inside the parasite where the drugs can inflict the most damage.”
Malaria is preventable and curable, but can be lethal, with two of the parasites—Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax—posing the greatest threat.
Symptoms of the disease tend to appear 10–15 days after infection from mosquito bite. The first symptoms include flu-like symptoms such as fever, headache, chills, and nausea, which can progress to severe illness if untreated.
It was also found that the use of cholesterol-like chemicals could overcome parasites’ resistance to malaria treatments.
Professor Malcolm McLeod, co-researcher, discussed the impact of this resistance, describing a compound called artemisinin, which is “currently one of the frontline treatments for malaria but unfortunately there’s resistance emerging even to that”.
“We were able to show that by linking an artemisinin drug to a cholesterol-like molecule, we were able to sort of reverse that resistance.”
The researchers also discussed the potential for this treatment method in supporting the agricultural industry and treating other diseases such as giardiasis, an intestinal disease, and leishmaniasis, which can affect the skin, mouth, nose, and throat.
Peer reviewers of the study noted that further research would be required, with the researchers agreeing that it could be several years before the method was usable for treating malaria in humans.
