{"id":7985,"date":"2016-03-10T09:42:49","date_gmt":"2016-03-10T09:42:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revoscience.com\/en\/?p=7985"},"modified":"2016-03-10T09:42:49","modified_gmt":"2016-03-10T09:42:49","slug":"an-easier-path-to-treating-malaria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/an-easier-path-to-treating-malaria\/","title":{"rendered":"An easier path to treat malaria"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bringing three powerful chemical groups together offers new possibilities in drug development.<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\"Drug<\/a>
Drug developments need to keep up with the constantly evolving parasites that cause malaria
Copyright : \u00a9 Stocktrek Images, Inc. \/ Alamy Stock Photo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A new chemical route for potential antimalarial compounds has been pioneered by chemists at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia. It offers hope for improved treatment of malaria, a disease that kills more than a million people each year.\u00a0<\/span>

\u201cThe parasites that cause the disease continuously evolve and become resistant to existing drugs, so we need to constantly design and synthesize new drugs to treat malaria,\u201d noted Xinbo Wang, a chemist in Associate Professor Zhiping Lai\u2019s group in the KAUST Physical Science and Engineering Division. The work could also lead to the development of new drugs against bacterial infections, cancer and other diseases.<\/span>

A chemical structure called the alpha-amino peroxide group, which is found in existing anti-malarial compounds, is a good basis for building potential new drugs. However, there are significant problems with existing methods for making such compounds because they require difficult chemical conditions.\u00a0<\/span>

Lai and his colleagues devised a simple and efficient procedure1 and showed that the alpha-amino peroxide group can be combined with an \u201cindole\u201d chemical grouping to make the \u201cN-(alpha-peroxy)-indole” structure.<\/span>

\u201cThere are lots of reports on the synthesis of indole or peroxide-containing compounds, but there are no general methodologies for combining the two functional groups in one molecule that had been previously reported,\u201d stated Wang.\u00a0<\/span>

<\/p>\n

[pullquote]A chemical structure called the alpha-amino peroxide group, which is found in existing anti-malarial compounds, is a good basis for building potential new drugs.\u00a0[\/pullquote]<\/p>\n

The KAUST team took things a step further by adding a carbazole group. The indole, carbazole and peroxide groups occur separately in many antimalarial, antibacterial and anti-tumor compounds.<\/span>

\u201cMerging these functional groups in one molecular structure may offer great potential for the discovery of new types of drugs,\u201d Wang said.<\/span>

The reactions proceed in \u201cone-pot, open atmosphere\u201d conditions, meaning everything occurs in one vessel without complicated intermediate steps. The vessel is also open to the air rather than protected by unreactive gases, as is required for many similar chemical processes.<\/span>

\u201cOur procedure could be easily handled and scaled-up to allow the construction of a new library of molecules for drug screening,\u201d he noted.<\/span>

Upscaling is the challenge that the KAUST researchers plan to turn to next to make a wide variety of compounds that can be tested for useful biological activity against a variety of diseases, and especially against malaria.\u00a0<\/span>

In developing their new chemical procedures, the researchers drew inspiration from a chemical reaction used by another research project at KAUST.<\/span>

\u201cOur story proves the importance of a multidisciplinary research environment, which we consider is the treasure of KAUST,” Lai said. “Here, experts from different fields work closely together.”<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new chemical route for potential antimalarial compounds has been pioneered by chemists at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":7986,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-medicine","category-research"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/3367.jpg",300,152,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/3367-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/3367.jpg",300,152,false],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/3367.jpg",300,152,false],"large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/3367.jpg",300,152,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/3367.jpg",300,152,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/3367.jpg",300,152,false],"ultp_layout_landscape_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/3367.jpg",300,152,false],"ultp_layout_landscape":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/3367.jpg",300,152,false],"ultp_layout_portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/3367.jpg",300,152,false],"ultp_layout_square":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/3367.jpg",300,152,false],"newspaper-x-single-post":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/3367.jpg",300,152,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-big":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/3367.jpg",300,152,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-list-image":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/3367.jpg",95,48,false],"web-stories-poster-portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/3367.jpg",300,152,false],"web-stories-publisher-logo":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/3367.jpg",96,49,false],"web-stories-thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/3367.jpg",150,76,false]},"author_info":{"info":["Amrita Tuladhar"]},"category_info":"Medicine<\/a> Research<\/a>","tag_info":"Research","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7985"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7985\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}