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posted by mrpg on Wednesday March 13 2019, @10:40AM   Printer-friendly
from the good-news dept.

According to research published March 11 in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology, the experimental drug DSM265 cured seven volunteers of infection by Plasmodium falciparum (the deadliest of the five human infecting Malaria parasite species) in a clinical study using a single oral dose.

The study confirmed findings of earlier studies. Only minor effects (abdominal tenderness, skin rash, itching) were observed in the previous or current studies.

The single dose aspect is crucial because currently,

it takes three days of combination therapy to cure malaria. "A single dose cure would provide a treatment that could improve compliance, reduce development of resistance, and eventually contribute to the eradication of this disease," said coauthor Jörg Möhrle,... Associate Professor of Infection Biology and Epidemiology, University of Basel, Switzerland.

Work is ongoing to improve the formulation of DSM265 and find a companion drug.

Cure notwithstanding, a companion drug is needed to prevent development of resistance. Resistance is a numbers game, caused by the emergence of random mutations that block a drug's action. The chance of random mutations arising concurrently to block both drugs' action is vanishingly small.

The end goal, of course, is to eradicate the parasite completely. Malaria causes over 200 million infections annually and kills between half and three-quarters of a million humans per year.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday March 14 2019, @06:11AM

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Thursday March 14 2019, @06:11AM (#814080) Journal

    Most of the affected nations are basket cases (and mostly because of what the developed nations have done to them over the last several hundred years). There are a few people in said developed nations who have some basic human decency remaining, and wish to help end this hideous scourge, the original "neglected tropical disease."

    Give the warming climate, there's also some enlightened self-interest at play here: warmer world means more Aedes and similar species with more Falciparum infections in more places further from the equator. It's not unrealistic to imagine there being a malaria issue in, for example, the UK by 2100.

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