Malaria drug hope from sea slugs
Mon 2 Jun 2008
Australian researchers are hoping sponges and sea slugs from the Great Barrier Reef will one day provide a treatment for the potentially deadly disease malaria.
Figures from the World Health Organisation (WHO) show a child dies of malaria every 30 seconds, most of them in Africa.
But with global warming and climate change, WHO expects the disease to spread to other parts of the world.
The Geneva-based Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV) has named an Australian drug discovery project using marine invertebrates from the Barrier Reef as its 2007 Project of the Year.
The marine creatures include sea slugs, sea anemones and sponges, said project leader Professor Ron Quinn of Brisbane's Eskitis Institute for Cell and Molecular Therapies.
"Quinine originally came from a tree so the project is looking at nature to find a possible treatment for malaria," said Prof Quinn, who is attending MMV's annual meeting and symposium in Ghana, attended by 150 of the world's leading malaria control researchers and organisations.
"The program we have is to look again at nature to look for new anti-malarials and the objective is to look for the next generation of drugs because there is already resistance to quinine and chloroquine."
Prof Quinn said the researchers have identified a unique chemical structure that specifically targets and kills the malaria parasite.
Business manager at the Eskitis Institute, Dr Stuart Newman, said hundreds of compounds from over 200,000 samples of plants and animals collected for the past 14 years in a "Nature Bank" are screened using high throughput robotic screening equipment at Griffith University.
"This is all about new small molecule drugs," Dr Newman said.
"Once we've got all the results from screening, we can go back and say `Well, this came from a sea slug' and we can go back and do a lot more tests and see exactly what it is in the slug that actually killed the malaria parasite."
But it was too soon to tell if a new drug could be developed as a malaria treatment.
"We are at the very early stages of discovery here and it could be 10 or 15 years and an awful lot of money to get a drug to market," Dr Newman said.