Recent developments in the chemotherapy of malaria.
Malaria remains a major infectious disease and is worsening in some areas, partly because of the spread of resistance to established antimalarial drugs. New drugs are urgently needed to combat the protozoan parasite, Plasmodium. This review covers new developments, including artemisinin derivatives, synthetic peroxides, folate pathway inhibitors, primaquine analogs and proteinase inhibitors. However, few of these agents are in clinical trials and many are derived from chemical classes already used extensively against malaria. The emerging understanding of parasite biology and new technological developments in drug discovery offer hope of improvement, but this will require increased interest from the pharmaceutical industry.
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Department of Microbiology, Moyne Institute, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland. abell@tcd.ie