English Transcript

Cập nhật 27/07/2008 19:38:00

Australian scientists have found a new way to fight malaria, one of the world's most deadly diseases. Malaria affects about 600-million people every year, but is developing resistance to drugs which are used to fight it.

Presenter: Simon Lauder; Speaker: Professor Alan Cowman from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research.

ALAN COWMAN: Malaria is one of the biggest problems for humans in the world. It kills over 2 million people, mostly young children under 5 years of age.

SIMON LAUDER: Why is there a need for further research in this area? Don't we already have drugs that attack malaria?

ALAN COWMAN: We do have drugs but unfortunately the parasite is incredibly smart and it's able to develop resistance to just about everything we can throw at it. If there needs to be development of new drugs, there needs to be development of vaccines and at the moment there are no vaccines to malaria and that is one of the things that a lot of people are working towards.

SIMON LAUDER: What's the discovery that you've made that may help in that area?

ALAN COWMAN: We've identified proteins that are absolutely essential for the parasite to allow it to stick in the organs that it sticks in such as the brain and the placenta. The reason that it sticks there is that essentially it stops it from moving through organs such as the spleen. So the parasite lives in red blood cells which are the cells that carry oxygen around in the blood.

SIMON LAUDER: So malaria's been able to I guess high jack red blood cells to bypass the immune system?

ALAN COWMAN: That's right. It can essentially live in them and gather all of its nutrients or food, but also allow it to hide and it does that by displaying proteins that it expresses on the surface of red blood cells. That essentially allows it to stick but also allows it to hide from host protective mechanisms.

SIMON LAUDER: And what have you found out about how it sticks to the blood cells?

ALAN COWMAN: We've identified proteins that are required for that process and this is really important information that we haven't known before and we haven't known the identity of these proteins at all and by knowing this essentially we can begin to target those proteins to potentially stop the parasite from sticking and that would then allow it to move through the spleen and allow the spleen to do its job as a sentinel and kill the parasite red blood cells or the red blood cells that are infected with malaria parasites. We can then really start to narrow in on and try and develop new treatments.