Question: is it hard trying to find lots of different ways to treat malaria?

Ailsa Powell answered on 14 Jun 2011:

It can be hard, but if you break the problem down into smaller questions it becomes easier.

If you want find a new way to treat a disease caused by an infectious agent – a parasite in the case of Malaria or bacteria if you want to look at more every days diseases – you need to look at the differences between it and the thing being infected (us humans 🙂 ). The reason you look for differences is that you wouldn’t want the new treatments to damage you. So in the case of bacteria they have a cell wall surrounding them and our cells don’t, so you would look at ways of exploiting the differences, penicillin and other antibiotics work by damaging the cell wall and that means the bacteria can’t survive.

Malaria is more complicated, but the parasite does have an interesting life cycle, part of it’s life is spent in a mosquito and part of it in humans. My colleagues and me set about looking for unique features of the parasites life cycle and found that some of the proteins it uses to trigger the next step in it’s life cycle are different from the similar types of proteins in humans. So this is what I’ve concentrated my work on. I’m trying to find out as much as possible about these proteins to see how we can use the differences we see to develop a new treatment.

It’s pretty hard work and I’m not guaranteed success, but it would be amazing if something I worked on could in some way help treat the millions of people who suffer from Malaria.