AAGM: New Chink Found in Malaria Armour.

(From Cape Argus (South Africa): AAGM)

Byline: Di Caelers

The war against malaria has been taken a step further with a groundbreaking finding by University of Cape Town scientists focused on helping overcome resistance to drugs currently used to fight it.

Reported in UCT's latest edition of Monday Paper, the work centres on iron metabolism in the malaria parasite, the target of the cheapest and most widely used anti-malaria drug, to which resistance is growing throughout Africa.

Dr Tim Egan, of UCT's department of chemistry, and a multi-disciplinary team from both UCT and the University of the Witwatersrand, have demonstrated clearly the fate of iron ingested by malaria parasites when they use human haemoglobin (an iron-containing blood protein) as a food source.

The haemoglobin is toxic to the parasite, which must get rid of it, Egan said.

The study has shown that an overwhelming portion of the iron is converted to a substance called malaria pigment, challenging recent suggestions that most of the iron is not incorporated into the pigment.