"Plasmodium falciparum" can be used to develop antimalarial vaccines

According to a recent report by the American Physicist Organization Network, scientists at Stanford University School of Medicine and the University of California, San Francisco, have adopted a novel "domesticating" technique to allow malaria parasites to rely on the supply of a foreign chemical to survive. The "domesticated malaria parasite." The toxicity of this domesticated P. falciparum is greatly reduced, and may stimulate the body's immune system response, thus providing the basis for the development of the first anti-malarial vaccine. The study was published on the August 30 Public Science Library Biology Series.

Plasmodium is a unicellular amoebae that causes malaria. They appear in different shapes in mosquitoes, human livers and blood to escape immune system attacks. They do not show symptoms in the human liver. After entering the red blood cells, they multiply and cause the red blood cells to break up, causing symptoms of alternating hot and cold.

The researchers found that after entering the blood cells, the parasite must rely on a basic substance, isopentenyl pyrophosphate (IPP), in order to survive. Under normal circumstances, IPP is synthesized by a unique organelle apicoplast, which is unique to Plasmodium.

They fed an antibiotic to the blood stage Plasmodium. This antibiotic allowed Plasmodium to separate from the apicoplast and cause them to die eventually. However, the use of this antibiotic is very slow. If antibiotics and IPP are added to the medium together, the parasites will still multiply.

"This shows that IPP is the only real need of Plasmodium in the blood phase for a variety of substances synthesized in apicoplast." Alan Y., of the Department of Pathology at Stanford University explained that because mammals make IPP in a completely different way from Plasmodium. Therefore, the drug that can destroy the IPP function of Plasmodium will not impair the ability of human cells to synthesize IPP, but it can also clear the Plasmodium.

Plasmodium kills about 1 million people every year. There are more than 250 million malaria cases in the world every year. There is no effective malaria vaccine. Although artemisinin is still effective, it has been reported that drug-resistant Plasmodium has been found. Alan Ya said: "If the drug-resistant Plasmodium prevails, we will be in great trouble, because almost all the therapeutics are based on artemisinin. And apicoplast is an important drug target, targeting its function is to develop anti-malaria The new direction of therapy."