A team of researchers has created a new drug against the most aggressive malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum which in 2022 caused almost 619.000 deaths worldwide.

Designated MED6-189, the new drug has been shown to be effective against both susceptible and resistant strains of falciparum vitro, as well as in mice engineered to have human blood, according to a statement from the University of California – Riverside.

The work, led by scientists from UC Riverside, UC Irvine e Yale School of Medicine, is published this week in the scientific journal Science, in an article entitled A Potent Kalihinol Analogue Disrupts Apicoplast Function and Vesicular Trafficking in P. falciparum Malaria.

The compound MED6-189 works by “damaging the apicoplast, an organelle (membrane-enclosed structure) found in P. falciparum cells, and disrupting vesicular trafficking pathways (between organelles),” and this dual action “prevents the pathogen from developing resistance,” making it “a highly effective and promising antimalarial drug to lead the fight against malaria.”

“Disruption of apicoplast and vesicular trafficking blocks parasite development and thus eliminates P. falciparum malaria infection in red blood cells and in our mouse model,” said Karine Le Roch, professor of molecular, cellular, and systems biology at UCR and senior author of the paper, quoted in the statement.

He added that MED6-189 was also found to be potent against other malaria parasites, “such as P. knowlesi and  P. cynomolgi".

The synthetic mixture MED6-189, based on a compound extracted from marine sponges, was synthesized in the laboratory of Christopher Vanderwal, professor of chemistry and pharmaceutical sciences at UC Irvine, who noted that “many of the best antimalarial agents are natural products or derivatives of them.”

This is the case of “artemisinin, initially isolated from the sweet wormwood plant, and its analogues” which “are extremely important for the treatment of malaria”, with the new drug being “a close relative of a different class of natural products”.

When MED6-189 was administered to mice infected with falciparum, researchers found that the drug rid the rodents of the parasite.

In collaboration with Choukri Ben Mamoun, professor of medicine and microbial pathogenesis at Yale School of Medicine, the team also tested the compound against P. knowlesi, a parasite that infects monkeys, and found that it worked as intended, clearing the monkey's red blood cells contaminated by the parasite.

"The team plans to continue optimizing MED6-189 and revalidating the compound's mechanisms of action using a systems biology approach," the statement said.

In addition to Le Roch, Vanderwal and Ben Mamoun, scientists from the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City and the University of Georgia in the United States, as well as the British pharmaceutical company GSK.

Malaria, also known as malaria, is a parasitic blood disease caused by a protozoan of the Plasmodium genus. This parasite is transmitted through the bite of an infected mosquito (of the Anopheles genus). Africa is the world's leading source of infections, accounting for approximately 95% of deaths worldwide and 94% of cases as of 2022.