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Malaria, which is still the cause nowadays of 350-500 million cases and almost one million deaths worldwide every year, occurs mainly in tropical climates. The disease is caused by mosquito-borne parasites transmitted to people by infected female Anopheles mosquitoes. The number of malaria infections has been declining for several decades but are now on the rise again, partly because the mosquitoes that transmit the disease have become resistant to the insecticides used against them and partly because the pathogen has become resistant to a significant proportion of the drugs used to treat it. Therefore, the need for newly developed active pharmaceutical ingredients for such diseases has increased.
A team consisting of five researchers at the Faculty of Pharmacy of the University of Debrecen (DE GYTK) has come up with significant findings in this field over a period of almost three years. Research fellow Miklós Bege, a member of the UD group, told hirek.unideb.hu that they had been originally working on the chemical development of new nucleoside analogues, which are fairly commonly used in antiviral and anti-tumor drugs, when they came across compounds that were thought to be effective against malaria.
“Apart from our Hungarian partners, we also collaborate with biologists from Belgium, the Czech Republic, Brazil and India as well. We maintain the closest relationship with our colleagues in India, to whom we have sent the specific compounds that we have produced, out of which they have selected the derivatives that are the most effective, and further tested them while confirming our hypothesis that one of them could be an effective new anti-malarial drug,” said Miklós Bege.
This discovery is highly significant for the researchers at the Faculty of Pharmacy in Debrecen, also because the experience gained from it have paved the way for further similar research, which could lead to the production of new compounds that are effective against a variety of other diseases.
The researchers of DE GYTK published a summary of their findings on malaria in Scientific Reports of Nature, a peer-reviewed journal, for which they then received the Publication Award of Count István Tisza Foundation for the University of Debrecen.
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