Drug-resistant malaria parasites cause concern

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Scientists in China have been working for 10 years to target increasing partial resistance to top anti-malaria drug, artemisinin. This is according to Dr Changsheng Deng, manager of the department of science and technology at Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine. He was addressing 27 journalists from Africa recently at the university on the benefits of artemisinin and how to reduce transmission of the disease by clearing the affected population of malaria parasites through mass drug administration. He said there was a special project focusing on resistance to the drug. Malaria is a life-threatening disease caused by parasites that are transmitted to people through a bite from a female mosquito.

Artemisinin, as a treatment to malaria, was discovered in China.

Pharmaceutical chemist Youyou Tu was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine two years ago for her ground-breaking discovery.

Deng said the World Health Organisation (WHO) approved the use of artemisinin two years ago.

Researchers aimed to eliminate malaria over the next decade.

“Our strategy seeks to eliminate blood borne malaria parasites from the human body.”

He said this was done through a process called "fast elimination of malaria by source eradication (FEMSE) through mass drug administration with Artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs)".

President of Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine, English Wang, was confident the drug could continue to help fight malaria in Africa and other parts of the world.

This was an opportunity to reduce the malaria burden on the African continent

Wang was part of a medical team who visited Africa this week.

They visited Malawi and Kenya.

High up on the agenda was the use of artemisinin for “the eradication of malaria" in these parts of the continent.

Malaria infected more than 200 million people and killed some 438000 people worldwide in 2015, most of them children in Africa.

Last month news agency AFP reported that for the first time in Africa, researchers have detected a malaria parasite that was partially resistant to artemisinin.

It raises concerns about efforts to fight a disease that affects millions of people each year.

The discovery means that Africa now joins southeast Asia in hosting such drug-resistant forms of the mosquito-borne disease, the news agency reported.

In a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, lead author Professor Arnab Pain, from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, said: “The spread of artemisinin resistance in Africa would be a major setback in the fight against malaria, as ACT (artemisinin-based combination therapy) is the only effective and widely used antimalarial treatment at the moment.”

“Therefore, it is very important to regularly monitor artemisinin resistance on a worldwide scale."

The drug-resistant malaria parasites were detected in a Chinese patient who had travelled from Equatorial Guinea to China, said the report led by Jun Cao from the Jiangsu Institute for Parasitic Diseases in China.

Combination therapy with artemisinin usually clears malaria from the blood in three days.

In southeast Asia, strains of the malaria-causing agent, Plasmodium falciparum, have grown relatively tolerant to artemisinin, in what is known as “partial resistance”.

Most patients can still be cured, but it takes longer.

WHO experts are concerned that Plasmodium falciparum could eventually become completely resistant to artemisinin, just as it has to other antimalarial drugs.

Researchers said they found the parasite carried a new mutation in a gene called Kelch13 (K13), which is the main driver for artemisinin resistance in Asia.

They then confirmed the origin of the resistance was Africa, by using “whole-genome sequencing and bioinformatics tools we had previously developed - like detectives trying to link the culprit parasite to the crime scene,” Pain explained.