{"id":15888,"date":"2021-11-03T10:13:23","date_gmt":"2021-11-03T10:13:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/?p=15888"},"modified":"2021-11-03T10:13:23","modified_gmt":"2021-11-03T10:13:23","slug":"promising-new-antimalarial-compound-discovered-in-mcmaster-hamburg-collaboration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/promising-new-antimalarial-compound-discovered-in-mcmaster-hamburg-collaboration\/","title":{"rendered":"Promising new antimalarial compound discovered in McMaster-Hamburg collaboration"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\r\n\"Bio-Rad<\/a>\r\n<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>

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Promising new antimalarial compound discovered in McMaster-Hamburg collaboration<\/h1>\/ in E-News<\/a> <\/span><\/span><\/header>\n<\/div><\/section>
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A study out of the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research at McMaster University has resulted in the discovery of a promising new antimalarial compound.<\/h3>\n

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Co-led by Gerry Wright, professor of biochemistry & biomedical sciences, the discovery opens the door to the development of new drugs targeting malaria, one of the deadliest infectious diseases on the planet.<\/p>\n

Collaborating with professor Tim Gilberger of the University of Hamburg in Germany, the research teams performed a screen of soil bacteria extracts for antimalarials and identified an extremely potent inhibitor of malaria development.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve shined a new light here,\u201d said Wright, the inaugural lead of Canada\u2019s Global Nexus for Pandemics and Biological Threats at McMaster. \u201cWe\u2019re looking at a part of chemistry that nobody has ever looked at before.\u201d<\/p>\n

This breakthrough, published in Cell Chemical Biology, comes at a pivotal time in global malaria management, Wright said.<\/p>\n

Drug resistance in malaria is becoming \u201ca huge problem\u201d, he said, and climate change is pushing malaria-carrying mosquitoes to new places, broadening the disease\u2019s spread. The World Health Organization estimates that malaria was responsible for more than 400,000 deaths and 229 million infections in 2019 alone.<\/p>\n

Wright said that the family of compounds under study \u2013 duocarmycins \u2013 have been known to kill malaria and cancer cells for some time; however, they are extremely toxic to humans. As such, using them as treatment comes with considerable collateral damage, which has resulted in many failed clinical trials. Wright calls these compounds \u2018anti-life,\u2019 since they kill just about everything in their path.<\/p>\n

However, PDE-I2, the new compound molecule discovered by the McMaster-Hamburg team, appears to come with all of the potent malariakilling properties of previously known duocarmycins \u2013 just without the adverse effects.<\/p>\n

Wright said the discovery was a decade in the making, beginning when he and Gilberger worked together at McMaster between 2010 and 2014.<\/p>\n

Since then, the Wright laboratory has been sending thousand of sub-fractions from Hamilton to Hamburg, where Gilberger and his team would assay them against malaria parasites at the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine.<\/p>\n

It was years of trial-and-error before the researchers finally fractionated the right molecule \u2013 a process Wright likens to finding a needle in a haystack.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis novel compound represents a useful scaffold for anti-malaria therapy,\u201d said Gilberger, who added that he is excited to explore its efficiency in systemic infections and to pinpoint its mode of action.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
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