A group of UCF researchers is looking to use cancer medications to hasten the development of new life-saving treatments for malaria as the disease becomes more and more drug-resistant.
Nathanael Gray, co-leader of Stanford University’s cancer therapeutics research program, and Elizabeth Winzeler, an expert in the development of malaria drugs from the University of California San Diego, are working together to test cancer drugs for their ability to fight malaria in a study that will be supported by the National Institutes of Health and funded for five years by an$ 3.8 million grant. Their most recent research was just released in the journal ACS Infectious Diseases.
Malaria is one of the most prevalent infectious diseases in the world and is brought on by parasites from the Plasmodium species that are spread by the bite of infected mosquitos. Over 600,000 deaths are caused by it annually, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. Children under the age of five account for about 80 % of these fatalities.
According to Chakrabarti, the malaria parasite’s genetic mutation over time makes it resistant to current medications. According to a report from the World Health Organization, malaria parasites are growing more and more resistant to the current treatment, which was first identified in the 1990s. Since it has been about 30 years since a new class of compounds were introduced to the market to treat malaria, new and more effective medications for the disease are therefore long overdue.
However, Chakrabarti noted that drug discoveries can take years or even decades because compounds must go through numerous stages of efficacy and safety testing.
Using current medications that have already received approval from the Food and Drug Administration is one of the ways we can hasten the discovery of new treatment options, according to Chakrabarti Saiys. This is referred to as” taking a piggyback approach ,” in which you examine currently available medications to determine whether they have anti-malaria properties. This will aid in accelerating the typically lengthy initial stages of drug discovery.
The team made the decision to repurpose protein kinase inhibitors, medications originally created for cancer treatment, for an accelerated path to drug therapy for malaria in order to meet the urgent need for new drugs. The pharmaceutical industry heavily targets protein kinases for cancer and other disease therapies because they are enzymes that control proteins in the body. The life cycle of the malaria parasite depends heavily on protein kinases, which makes them suitable drug targets.
In the course of the investigation, Ph. Under Chakrabarti’s direction, D. candidate Monica Bohmer tested a variety of anti-cancer protein kinase inhibitors to find those that are known to target human Polo-like kinse, an important protein family member in human cell division. She found that a class of inhibitors, specifically BI-2536, an well-known human kinase 1 inhibitor with Polo-like properties, had potent anti-malaria properties.
The protein kinase inhibitors targeted a different family of proteins called NEK, which also control cell division, despite the fact that the malaria parasite plasmodium lacks Polo-like kinsases. Additionally, they focused on other stress-response pathways that contributed to the parasite’s demise.
& nbsp, Monica Bohmer, Ph. D. is a candidate.
She continued by saying that additional research will look into how these NEK proteins work in the parasite.
Overall, this study offers important insights into the potential of repurposing protein kinase inhibitors for the treatment of malaria, according to Chakrabarti. It also emphasizes the need for additional study to pinpoint new targets and maximize the effectiveness of these inhibitor.
At UCF, Chakrabarti has spent more than 25 years conducting malaria research. He joined the university in 1995 and was one of the first UCF faculty members to receive an NIH grant. He is a professor and the director of Molecular Microbiology at the Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences. He completed post-doctoral training in molecular biology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln after receiving his doctorate in biochemistry from the university of Calcutta.