With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), researchers from the State Universities of Campinas (Unicamp), São Paulo (USP) and Federal Universities of Goiás (UFG) identified medicines already approved for use in humans, or in the clinical study phase, that have potential action against the malaria parasite. The target of the work published in the ACS Omega magazine was Plasmodium falciparum, the species responsible for the most serious cases of malaria in the country. As the authors highlight in the article, the use of computational tools can facilitate the discovery of drugs against the parasite, which has the capacity to quickly develop resistance.
Malaria is one of the main public health challenges in tropical and subtropical regions, causing almost 250 million cases every year worldwide. In the absence of an efficient and definitive vaccine against the disease, treatment includes a combination of drugs that act at different stages of the P. falciparum life cycle to avoid resistance, which is common.
“Therefore, there is an urgent need to identify new drugs”, highlights Carolina Horta Andrade, coordinator of the study and lead researcher at the Laboratory of Drug Planning and Molecular Modeling (LabMol) at UFG and collaborator at the Institute of Biology (IB) at UFG. Unicamp.
Access the article Transcriptomics-Guided In Silico Drug Repurposing: Identifying New Candidates with Dual-Stage Antiplasmodial Activity
Access the article Identification of potential inhibitors of casein kinase 2 alpha of Plasmodium falciparum with potent in vitro activity
