Scientists in Australia have found a potential new way of combating malaria. The researchers believe that by targeting the eight genes that help malaria attack the body it's possible to prevent the infected red blood cells from sticking to blood vessels.
Malaria kills up to 3 million people each year. Most of those deaths are in tropical areas of the world where mosquitoes thrive. The disease takes place when a mosquito injects microscopic parasites into healthy red blood cells. Those parasites go on to change the structure of blood cells and produce more offspring that goes on to infect more red blood cells.
Professor Alan Cowman and his group's research will be published in this week's issue of
Cell.
Malaria causes infected cells to lost their rigid shape and develop knobs on their surface. That restructuring of the cell causes for the blood not to flow properly.
"This stops the cells from being cleared by the spleen, which is a protective mechanism for the parasite," Cowman says. "It's absolutely essential for the parasite to survive in our bodies."
That structural change also allows for infected cells to clog. Those clogs can become a serious issue when brain involvement takes place such as in the case of cerebral malaria.
The research team discovered that by disrupted just one of the eight genes that are affected the infected cells no longer can stick to the walls of blood vessels.
"It really is a big step in understanding the parasite itself," Cowman says.
"In the long term it points toward concentrating on some of these proteins so that they don't work any more, so the parasite would be cleared much more efficiently."
This new knowledge could be a new way to treat the disease. With more understanding of ways to weaken the parasite it is possible in the future to be able to produce a vaccine against the disease.
