Target identification of PyAz90, a new antimalarial compound

Abstract

Malaria is a preventable, diagnosable, and treatable disease. Nevertheless, it causes thousands of deaths every year, and millions of people are still endangered. There is an urgent need to eliminate malaria since drug resistance is reappearing. There is general agreement that elimination is not simply a matter of intensifying the use of available tools. New strategies, like transmission-blocking, will be required. Our lab has focused on the search for transmission blocking (TB) compounds. The FAPESP Ph.D. project proposes using a new tool developed to screen in high throughput compound libraries and identifying new TB compounds. Among the newly identified compounds, one of them (PyAz90) represents a class of compounds with unknown antiplasmodial activity. Here we propose a BEPE fellowship that will allow us to develop more studies with PyAz90, which already showed an expressive capacity to block transmission, and also inhibits asexual stages of Plasmodium falciparum in vitro. (AU)