By Jenn Green

Scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) may have developed a new treatment for malaria after finding a way to lock the parasites within infected blood cells and potentially trapping the disease.

The research aimed to discover how to block the invasion of healthy cells by malaria parasites, but this inadvertent twist could offer a different drug target for fighting one of the world’s most common and lethal diseases.

Malaria, a mosquito-borne infectious disease affects nearly half a billion people each year and has built a resistance to numerous treatments. But HSPH scientists have located a protein in the parasite that enables it, and its offspring, to escape from infected human red blood cells and rapidly invade healthy cells. Removing this protein confines the parasites to infected cells.

Manoj Duraisingh, Assistant Professor of immunology and infectious diseases at HSPH, was excited by the new discovery. “It was a surprise that this protein kinase, which we thought would be involved in red blood cell invasion, turns out to be essential for the parasite getting out of the cell.”

This is the first time a protein critical for parasite egress from red blood cells has been located using genetic techniques. But also this particular protein happens to be absent in humans. Consequently it is possible that a drug developed to target that protein could provide a safe treatment for people.

The research demonstrates the effectiveness of a new tool that the team used to locate numerous proteins from the kinase family and other signalling pathways at different stages through a malaria infection.

“We have a malaria genome of about 6,000 genes,” said Duraisingh. We now “need a means of prioritising specific gene candidates for further drug development.”

The HSPH team also developed another tool during the study - ‘Mature Invasive Parasites’ - that could prove extremely valuable in future research.

“One of the experiments mechanically releases the parasites, which have matured into virulent and invasive forms,” Duraisingh said. “People have been trying to get viable parasites in this form for study. This is a great resource for vaccine studies.”