Bug enthusiasts who caught the January 2011 edition of the Journal of Insect Physiology may have noticed something odd on page 35, just under the lead scientist’s name:

Huron Park Secondary School, Woodstock, Ontario, Canada.

Jessie MacAlpine was only a Grade 9 student when she published her first research paper, “The effects of CO2 and chronic cold exposure on fecundity of female Drosophila melanogaster.”

Today, the 18-year-old is in her first year at the University of Toronto and has moved on to even loftier pursuits. Using a molecular compound she stumbled upon in high school, MacAlpine is developing a potential new drug for malaria, a parasitic disease that infects about 219 million people every year and is growing resistant to available drugs.

If all goes according to plan, MacAlpine’s drug will be cheap, effective and accessible to people in the developing world. It will also be made from mustard oil.

“Globally, we’re always in desperate need of another anti-malarial product,” said Ian Crandall, a U of T professor who has been working with MacAlpine at the Sandra A. Rotman Laboratories, where he is a principal investigator.

“The interesting thing about what Jessie has been doing is (that) growing mustard oil is not something that requires a huge facility to do. If it’s kind of a natural product that can be used to treat malaria, then it’s something that’s worth looking into.”

The daughter of an accountant and stay-at-home mom, MacAlpine knew she wanted to be a scientist as early as Grade 2, when she signed one of her homework assignments “Dr. Jessie MacAlpine.” By the time she graduated high school, she had already won a top prize at an international science fair, launched a research collaboration with U of T scientists and made two interesting discoveries in her basement lab — both of which she is now in the process of patenting.

One of her patents is for a bioherbicide, which MacAlpine developed using molecular compounds found in garlic mustard plants and Tim Hortons coffee grounds.

The other is a mustard-oil compound, allyl isothiocyanate — the stuff that gives mustard and wasabi its pungent kick — which she hopes to develop into a treatment.

The idea came to her in Grade 11, after reading a newspaper article about a potential treatment using herbicides. In the ’90s, scientists discovered that the parasite causing malaria — a species called Plasmodium — actually has plant genes because it evolved hundreds of millions of years ago from an ancient algae.

These plant genes are essential to the parasite’s survival. So the thinking was: if herbicides killed plant genes, maybe they could kill malaria parasites too.

“Since I’d spent the past two years developing a herbicide, I thought, ‘Ooh, maybe I can change my compound into a malaria drug,” she recalls.

Other scientists worldwide are already working on new treatments that could target these plant genes; some have reached clinical trials. But as far as MacAlpine knows, no one has studied using mustard oil.

While her early experiments have shown promise, her research is still in the very early stages. David Roos, a University of Pennsylvania biology professor whose lab helped confirm Plasmodium’s plant ancestry, applauds MacAlpine’s efforts but cautions that “the world is full of thousands and thousands of natural products that have been shown to be effective against malaria parasites (but) have not wound up as drugs.”

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For MacAlpine, success — if it ever comes — is at least 10 years and millions of dollars away. “It’s also important to remain realistic,” she notes. “There’s still a lot of tests that need to be done and a lot of work that needs to be completed for that dream to be realized.”

But luckily for MacAlpine, age 18, there is plenty of time.