Portland State Magazine Winter 2016

20 pORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE winter 2016 MALARIA has been a deadly enemy of mankind throughout history, but a research team at Portland State may have found one of the most effective defenses yet in fighting it. It’s a compound that can be put in pill form and has the potential to cure malaria in a single dose. The discovery, announced in October, was years in the making and has years to go before it can be used. But if clinical trials are successful, it will be a game-changer in the world of malaria treatment. The one-dose oral cure would stand in stark contrast to current injectable medicines, which must be refrigerated and administered by a medical professional. They’re not one-dose treatments, and the malaria parasite can become resistant to them. “The advantage of a one-pill solution is that it’s one pill,” says PSU chemistry professor and lead researcher Kevin Reynolds. “If you have to take a medicine twice a day, every day for a week like an antibiotic, you have the danger— through forgetfulness, apathy or just thinking you’re all better—of quitting the treatment before it’s complete. Plus, a one-pill knockout will reduce the chances that the parasite in your system will mutate and become harder to kill.” The compound is based on a natural red pigment that comes from a soil bacterium. Reynolds says the catalyst for his research was an old paper from the 1970s that hinted at the pigment’s potential in treating malaria, but for one reason or another—inadequate technology or the variety of malarial cures already in existence—nobody had given it much thought until Reynolds rediscovered it about five years ago. Over those five years, Reynolds and his research team— including Jane Kelly and Papireddy Kancharla—created hundreds of variants of the compound and tested them on mice and on human blood infected by malaria. This summer they struck gold with one variant that killed the malaria parasite over 28 days with a single low dose. One challenge for the researchers was to develop a way to take the compound orally. The compound doesn’t naturally dissolve in water, which means it can’t be taken in pill form. Reynolds and his team mixed it with oil, which solves the problem and opens the potential for turning it into a pill. Reynolds says several more years of research will be needed before the medicine reaches people in need. Among other things, the team will be looking for side effects and toxicity, which means they will be performing autopsies on mice used in the experiments. Eventually, the drug will be tested on humans. In the meantime, he’s applied for a patent. HERE’S A GLIMPSE at the enemy. Malaria is a mosquito-borne parasite that has plagued humanity for as long as recorded history. It was linked to the decline of ancient Greek city-states hundreds of years BCE. A malarial epidemic in the fifth century may have contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire. One man out of every 100 who worked on the construction of the Panama Canal in the early 1900s died of malaria until an all-out effort was made to control it. Even today, with effective treatments for the disease and advancements in medical science, malaria kills about half a million people per year. Most of the deaths occur in sub- Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. Most of the victims are children under the age of five. Mosquitoes carry the parasite in their salivary glands. Once introduced in a human host, the parasite travels to the liver and replicates. It can go dormant in the liver cells for a year or two, or it can spread immediately through the bloodstream, infecting red blood cells. It feeds off the hemoglobin in the red blood cells, producing anemia, low blood pressure, fever, chills and sweating. It can spread to the lungs, causing acute respiratory distress. It can spread to the brain, which is fatal. wr i t t e n b y j ohn k i rk land Researchers d i scover a potent i al knockout punch aga i nst malar i a