The effect of novel compounds on the growth of Plasmodium falciparum and haemozoin formation
Date
2015
Authors
Chen, Chien-Teng
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Abstract
With the social economic hardships plaguing the malaria‐affected areas, new drug
targets and treatment strategies are being sought to combat the emergence of resistance to
the mainstay antimalarial combination therapies. The process of haemozoin formation is the
ideal target for many reasons: it is not encoded nor expressed in the parasite genome, and
the process cannot be mutated, lending itself as an ideal target for novel drug designs. The
high‐throughput β‐haematin inhibitory activity (BHIA) assay was optimised to screen a series
of novel synthetic compounds and compare this activity to the effects on the whole asexual
parasite (tritiated hypoxanthine assay) taking into account cytotoxicity (using the
tetrazolium cell viability assay).