Scientists believe they have opened up a new front in the fight against malaria after discovering how the parasite that causes the disease is able to feed and grow after it invades the body.
Within two days of entering the body, where it holes up in a red blood cell, the single-cell parasite grows to many times its original size and then divides to produce between 20 and 30 new parasites, which multiply in turn.
In order to grow at this astonishing rate, the greedy parasite needs to absorb high rates of nutrients from outside the infected blood cell.
However, the pathways in normal red blood cells are not big enough to supply the high volume of nutrition.
Writing in Thursday's issue of Nature, the British science weekly, scientists from the US National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, describe how the parasite solves this problem by opening up a nutrient channel in the infected cell's outer membrane.
That opens up an "attractive target" for new anti-malarial drugs that would stop up the channel, starving the parasite at the earliest stage of infection, Australian molecular biologist Kiaran Kirk said in a commentary.
"Screening chemical libraries for molecules that block this channel may well lead to much-needed new drugs with which to combat the increasingly drug-resistant malaria parasite," he said.
Malaria causes between 1.5 million and 2.7 million deaths a year, the overwhelming majority of them in sub-Saharan Africa.
There is no viable vaccine against the mosquito-borne parasite, which is also becoming resistant to the most commonly used drugs -- PARIS (AFP)
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