Malaria

Malaria

The well-defined distribution of DXP and MVA pathways offers unique opportunities to develop mechanism-based inhibitors of DXP pathway enzymes as broad-spectrum antibiotics, antimalaria drugs, and herbicides with little or no toxicity to humans or animals. Since the targets and mechanisms of these inhibitors are different from the current drugs, antibiotics or antimalaria drugs developed based on IspG, IspH studies will be especially useful for the treatment of multi-drug resistance strains. Many of these diseases are primarily in impoverished countries (e. g., malaria threatens 300 to 500 million people annually and causes the death of between 1 and 1.5 million each year), research in this sub-area aims at resolving the following two issues: a) decrease the drug price to the level affordable for developing countries; b) develop methods to convert broad-spectrum antibiotics to antibiotics more specific to certain pathogens or parasite, which will decrease the chance of developing multi-drug resistance strains.