Antimalarial Drug Resistance and Early Drug Discovery

Abstract

The malaria parasite has been allowed to get perilously close to winning the upper hand in the race between new drugs and resistance development. Today, just one class of drugs is left to avoid a public health disaster of global proportions, the artemisinins, and even they are showing signs of a possible impending failure. Rational approaches to overcoming antimalarial drug resistance are difficult for several reasons. Resistance mechanisms are varied and imperfectly known across Plasmodium species and often there is not a good correlation between in vitro drug susceptibility, molecular markers of resistance and therapeutic failure, except for antimalarials acting on well defined molecular t..