A recent breakthrough from the Indiana University School of Medicine offers new hope for fast-acting antimalarial treatments that could target the malaria parasite across multiple life stages. Led by Sabrina Absalon, PhD, assistant professor of pharmacology and toxicology, the research uncovers a key structural feature in the Plasmodium parasite’s apicoplast, an organelle crucial for parasite survival. In this second of our interview with Absalon, she discusses how this discovery could reshape malaria treatment strategies and its potential impact on drug development.
“We are kind of bringing the idea that don’t forget that you can arrest and block the progress of a parasite by also blocking how organelles are dividing or placed in the cells because you’re changing the organelle communication,” Absalon explained. “And that’s a field that is growing even in neuroscience. There’s a lot of research on how your mitochondria communicate with your ER, with your nucleus to exchange nucleotides, to exchange calcium, a lot of messages that will help a cell or a parasite to grow to react to the environment.”
She continued, “So we are kind of telling there are a lot of pathways that no one thought to look at that can be, will be definitely different from the host because we don’t have an apicoplast. And so we’ll limit it to all the side effects of drugs.”
Absalon also emphasized that targeting the apicoplast could potentially affect all stages of the parasite’s life cycle. “This apicoplast is present in all the stages of the parasites, not the one only in the blood state, the one in the liver before you get sick. If we could kill it in your liver, you would never develop malaria,” she said. “Or inside the mosquito, they also need this apicoplast, and it also grows as a tree and a branch. So by targeting this very specific pathway of division of that organelle, we can affect all the stages in the vector, in the human, and three infections of your red blood cells.”
Absalon further discussed the advancements in tools and techniques that have allowed researchers to ask new questions. “Thanks to all the development of other scientists in different fields that create new tools, we can now ask new questions and maybe develop new drugs that we never thought could go for it.”
However, she also expressed concern over current funding cuts to malaria research. “The only thing that I would love to take the opportunity to advocate is in the current decision to reduce a lot of grants,” Absalon said. “For instance, I’ve learned that even the DoD, the defense, will not give any more foundation for research on malaria, which is dramatic for the American citizen because maybe they feel that they are not exposed to malaria. Even so, with climate change, we have been already seeing local infection last year, but they also forget their military that are deployed around the world and exposed to malaria.”
Absalon urged policymakers to recognize the broader implications of funding cuts. “I really fear that a lot of soldiers will be at risk and a lot of American citizens and a lot of children. This is a disease that kills mostly children under five. So I’m really calling for people and senators to really fight for not losing that funding and other funding for science because, as you said, it’s the discovery of Ed Boyden in MIT working on the neuroscience field that gave a tool to a lot of other scientists to study their questions to save lives. And so I really hope you can understand that we need more research.”
