Scientists develop novel technique for finding drugs to combat malaria
Wednesday, February 11, 2015 - 08:31
in Health & Medicine
Each year nearly 600,000 people—mostly children under age five and pregnant women in sub-Saharan Africa—die from malaria, caused by single-celled parasites that grow inside red blood cells. The most deadly malarial species—Plasmodium falciparum—has proven notoriously resistant to treatment efforts. But thanks to a novel approach developed by scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and described in the January 20 online edition of ACS Chemical Biology, researchers can readily screen thousands of drugs to find those potentially able to kill P. falciparum.