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Portuguese works on the creation of a protein to stop malaria
Portuguese microbiologist Maria Rebelo is working on producing a protein that blocks the binding site of the parasite that causes malaria to the host cell and thus help stop the disease.
© Getty Images
País Malária
Speaking to Lusa News Agency about World Malaria Day, which is marked on Thursday, the researcher said that her entire scientific and research career has been mostly focused on malaria.
Speaking to Lusa News Agency about World Malaria Day, which is marked on Thursday, the researcher said that her entire scientific and research career has been mostly focused on malaria.
"I think it is a super-relevant disease for global health and, however, sometimes we have the impression that it is neglected", she said about this pathology that killed 608,000 people in 2022.
In collaboration with the Queensland Institute of Medical Research (QIMR Berghofer), a medical research institute in Seattle, Australia, Maria Rebelo is testing "a completely new approach to try to prevent malaria infection".
"[The work consists of] developing a molecule (protein) that can prevent the parasite from invading the host's cells, which represents a change in the therapy we normally use and, thus, can constitute a new therapeutic approach and help in the fight against malaria", she said.
"We are trying to create molecules, proteins designed completely from scratch - that are not based on anything that exists in nature - and what we want them to do is to bind to the parasite and, by binding to the parasite, make it so that the parasite cannot bind to the host cell", she explained.
In practice, she said, the team is "trying to block the parasite's binding access to the host cell".
By administering this protein to malaria patients, the parasite is unable to infect new cells and the infection cycle stops, as the parasite cannot replicate the disease, thus failing to cause serious illness. In turn, the parasites that are there are eliminated by the body and there are no new parasites.
The project is at a very early stage and the team is currently designing the protein using computational models.
"After this design, we produce the protein, test it with cells in the laboratory, a series of affinity and efficacy tests before the pre-clinical tests in animal models. We hope that in three years we will have the pre-clinical efficacy results and then we will move on to clinical trials in humans", she said.
The researcher believes that, despite her optimism, the new molecule will not reach patients before the next eight years.
Read Also: Malaria is a disease of poverty that could be controlled with resources (Portuguese version)
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