Discovery of new targets for antimalarial chemotherapy

Abstract

The understanding of the biology and the biochemistry of malaria parasites has considerably increased over the past two decades with the discovery of many potential targets for new antimalarial drugs. The decrypted genomes of several Plasmodium species and the new post-genomic tools further enriched our “reservoir” of targets and increased our ability to validate potential drug targets or to study the entire parasite metabolism. This review discusses targets involved in calcium metabolism, protein prenylation and apicoplast functions that have emerged by different approaches.

Keywords

• antimalarials
• drug targets
• artemisinin
• SERCA
• apicoplast
• isoprenoid
• haem
• farnesyltransferase