Malaria Drugs Makin It did not work

Jakarta, popular medications such as pills Quinine for Malaria now does not work anymore. The only drug that still remains for Malaria Artemisinin is impervious. But the researchers found already there are signs that also indicate the drug is not effective to treat malaria.

"Malaria remains a very important problem for Indonesia, the only drug is artemisinin (ACT / Artemisinin-Combination Therapies). But in Thailand is emerging signs of resistance (rejection)," said Director of the Eijkman Institute for Mlecular Biology, Professor Sangkot Marzuki, AM, MD, PhD, DSc on the sidelines of the 5th International Eijkman Conference at Hotel Borobudur, Jakarta, Thursday (10/11/2011).

Prof. Sangkot said today the World Health Organization (WHO) have really keeping drug resistance is not to spread. This condition can be a sign for researchers to seek an anti-new anti-malarial.

Although already in use, but drug artemisinin unknown function or how it works in the body, but that's the important thing. Because if you can find out on this, the researchers could look for other drugs to inhibit the same process.

"In addition to artemisinin, there is one drug that we know for malaria but the price is very expensive, these drugs inhibit the processes for making the components of DNA in the cell, if this component is of course inhibited cells or parasites can not grow," he added.

Prof. Sangkot revealed to the need to find new targets that a lot in making anti-malarial that can later be rotated. These targets can be sought by understanding the workings of an existing drug, if already known to be carried out modifications to existing drugs or find new drugs.

"This is where the importance of conducting fundamental research in finding new targets that can later be applied to the clinic and the field," said Prof. Sangkot.

Malaria is an infectious disease caused by a protozoan parasite Plasmodium group that transmission occurs through the bite of Anopheles mosquitoes. Note there are four types of Plasmodium parasite that can infect humans are Plasmodium falciparum, Plasmodium vivax, Plasmodium ovale and Plasmodium malariae. (Ver / ir)