News July
Drug Library Yields 'Promising' Malaria Therapy
Researchers who tested more than 2,000 drugs for activity against
the malaria parasite say a commonly-used allergy drug holds promise
for treating the disease.
The findings were published yesterday (2 July) in Nature Chemical
Biology.
Research into drugs for diseases that mostly affect developing
countries is time-consuming and hampered by a lack of funding.
One solution is to test collections of existing drugs for possible
new applications, but such drug libraries are generally small.
David Sullivan of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public
Health in the United States and his colleagues are creating a new,
comprehensive collection.
So far they have included 2,687 drugs that have been approved for
medical use or are being tested for approval.
The researchers screened these for compounds that harm the malaria
parasite Plasmodium falciparum.
One of the most promising candidates was astemizole, a drug used
to treat allergic reactions. It is sold in generic form in more
than 30 countries including Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam.
The researchers tested astemizole in mice infected with one of
two strains of malaria: one that is sensitive to the existing malaria
drug chloroquine and one that is not.
At low doses, astemizole reduced the number of chloroquine-susceptible
parasites by 81 per cent but was less effective against chloroquine-resistant
malaria.
Jean-René Kiechel, project manager for the Drugs for Neglected
Diseases initiative, says the research shows that an "opportunistic
approach… has potential for breakthrough".
Nick White, professor of tropical medicine at the University of
Oxford in the United Kingdom and Mahidol University in Thailand,
says astemizole's potential as an anti-malarial drug needs to be
further investigated, but that the research is "a good start".
Sullivan and colleagues are now expanding the Johns Hopkins Clinical
Compound Library to include every available drug ever used in phase
II clinical trials or approved by the US Food and Drug Administration
and its foreign counterparts.
They will then make the collection available to any researcher
interested in screening it for potential drugs against diseases
in developing countries.
Source http://www.scidev.net/content/news/eng/
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