Dr. Emily Derbyshire, Harvard Medical School

A Chemical Genetics Study of Liver Stage Malaria

Despite increased efforts to develop new therapeutic agents for malaria, a parasitic disease that afflicts millions of people each year, the disease’s impact is increasing due to parasite resistance to first-line antimalarial drugs.  All existing drugs target a limited range of processes in the parasite’s blood stage, and in an effort to develop dramatically different therapies a high-throughput chemical genetic screen for inhibitors of the parasite’s liver stage was performed.  This presentation covers the parasite’s life cycle, with an emphasis on the need for targeting the liver stage, and our phenotypic screen to address the elusive liver stage of malaria.  The high-throughput screen identified 37 known bioactive compounds, including some FDA-approved drugs, as liver stage malaria inhibitors. Many of these active compounds have molecular structures and putative targets distinctly different from known antimalarial agents suggesting they have diverse modes of action.  Further studies of these compounds can expand the current understanding of malariabiology and facilitate future antimalarial drug discovery.

For more information contact Prof. Wendy Kelly (404-385-1154).