Every 30 seconds a child in Africa dies of malaria, according to the World Health Organization, and between one and two million people die from this disease around the world every year, said Gary Posner, professor of chemistry in the School of Arts and Sciences.
Posner and others at Hopkins, including colleagues from the School of Medicine and the Bloomberg School of Public Health, recently published a paper in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association that explains their development of a new anti-malarial drug.
The drug has stirred excitement because it has a 100 percent success rate in curing malaria when given orally to infected mice.
"We hoped to find a safe and efficacious cure for people who have malaria. We have succeeded through the stage of testing on rodents," Posner said.
While preventive strategies like insecticide-treated bed nets are effective in slowing the transmission of malaria, they are not available in some areas where malaria is prevalent.
Furthermore, as of yet there is no vaccine for the disease. As a result, many people don't have protection against the mosquitoes that transmit malaria, and so hundreds of millions of people are currently infected.
Formerly common drugs like quinine, the oldest anti-malarial, and others of the same class called alkaloids, are becoming increasingly ineffective as the parasite becomes resistant, according to the World Health Organization's (WHO's) Guidelines.
As a result, WHO is recommending combination drug therapies. According to WHO's Guidelines, certain combination therapies have been shown to reduce the number of parasites in an individual infected with malaria at a much higher rate than other kinds of anti-malarial drugs.
Posner's lab used chemicals derived from trioxane artemisinin, a chemical ingredient often found in Chinese herbal remedies, paired with an alkaloidal drug. The approach is called artemisinin combination therapy.
The lab created 11 combinations, using methods of organic and medicinal chemistry, that fit the commonly accepted criteria for 100 percent efficacy - the complete absence of malaria parasites in the blood 30 days post-infection.
Posner's interest in artemisinin grew out of a project he worked on with the biology department at Hopkins that was unrelated to malaria. While experimenting with a chemical group called peroxides, his interest was piqued when he learned that they were an important ingredient in Chinese folk medicine and he decided to pursue them.
Fifteen years later he and his lab have produced an exciting drug that could have widespread future applications.
Although this group of drug has been shown to cure malaria with 100 percent efficacy, Posner hopes to continue refining his research. "We certainly will be involved in designing related compounds with higher efficacy. Instead of three doses we are aiming for a cure via one dose."
Reducing the regimen from three days to one would make the drugs less expensive and increase the chances of its being taken correctly, which is a priority because according to WHO, most malaria treatment takes place in poor, rural areas.
Knowing this, Posner's group made an effort to reduce the number of steps necessary to produce the chemicals needed to make the drug more affordable and therefore practical as a treatment option for people with malaria, a disproportionate percentage of whom are children.
Although much more testing must be done before these drugs are used to treat people with malaria, according to Posner, their creation "represents a major advance in the development of new drug candidates for the treatment of malaria."
