With unpredictable rains and changing seasons, there is a spike in the cases of dengue and malaria in the country. For many years there has been no dedicated medicine to treat them but the treatment includes a course of medicines that kill infections and help with fever. These days a medicine that is otherwise given to cancer patients is being clinically tested which has validated the potential to protect from, cure, and prevent transmission of malaria.
This miraculous discovery is made by a capable team of researchers and has evolved new hopes against Malaria which takes away lives of over 500,000 people every year. The researchers were working very hard in finding a solution and experimented to check if sapanisertib, a medicine undergoing clinical trials for the treatment of tumors such as breast cancer, endometrial cancer, glioblastoma, renal cell carcinoma, and thyroid cancer, could prove useful to treat malaria.
Sapanisertib, has the ability to protect people against, cure, and prevent malaria transmission by killing the parasite at various phases of its life cycle inside its human host. The researchers also discovered that sapanisertib contained various proteins called kinases in the malaria parasite, which is how the medicine kills the human malaria parasite.
Tarrick Qahash, an undergraduate turned technician in Penn State’s Llinas lab, employed mass spectrometry-based metabolomics to determine the parasite’s reaction to a number of antimalarial drugs as part of the Malaria Drug Accelerator project supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
“In cancer, sapanisertib inhibits a protein kinase called mTOR that regulates a variety of cellular processes, including immune response and autophagy. However, until this study, it was unclear how it would affect the malaria parasite,” said Llinas. “We used a process called metabolic fingerprint profiling and found that the parasite’s response to sapanisertib resembled inhibition by other protein kinase inhibitors we had investigated. Through its effects on the parasite’s metabolism of hemoglobin–a protein that carries oxygen through the blood–we determined that sapanisertib primarily inhibits the kinase called PfPI4Kb, but we also found that it can target a kinase called PKG.”
Potential impact of the trial
This research has let to new possibilities for the creation of malaria medications that target two or more protein targets in the malaria parasite.
The goal is to assess how the estimated human dose of sapanisertib for malaria differs from the maximum tolerated dose used to treat cancer.
