Antibiotics for malaria — a novel option for future medicine
If mice are administered an antibiotic for three days and are simultaneously infected with malaria, no parasites appear in the blood and life-threatening disease is averted. In addition, the animals treated in this manner also develop robust, long-term immunity against subsequent infections. This innovative discovery has opened a new window in the prevention of malaria and its fatal complications.
This breakthrough innovation was made by the team headed by Dr Steffen Borrmann from the Department of Infectious Diseases at Heidelberg University Hospital in cooperation with Dr Kai Matuschewski of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin. The scientists think that safe and affordable prophylaxis with antibiotics in residents of areas with high malaria transmission has the potential to be used as a natural needle-free vaccination against malaria.
Malaria is still the most common and most dangerous vector-borne disease. Globally, over three billion people are at risk of being infected with malaria. There is still no medicine that reliably protects people from infection and simultaneously promotes building up long-term immunity.
The scientists developed the following immunisation model on mice. They showed that antibiotic slowed growth of dormant parasite in liver and prevented the blood from becoming infected. The typical disease symptoms such as fever and if left untreated, fatal malaria, which are caused solely by the blood stage forms of the parasite, did not occur. The parasites that accumulated in the liver gave the immune system sufficient stimulus to develop robust, long-term immunity. After adding antibiotic (Clindamycin or Azithromycin) all animals had complete protection against malaria.
This of course raises the question of whether these results can be transferred to humans. Under field conditions, mosquito bites confront the human body with frequent, but rather low concentrations of parasites. When mimicking this infection mode in the mouse model, 30 percent of the mice were still protected. For 85 percent of the mice that were still infected, the malaria did not affect the brain, indicating a favorable prognosis. The antibiotics used are reasonably priced medicines with few and self-limiting side effects. The periodic, prophylactic administration of antibiotics to people in malaria regions has the potential to be used as a "needle-free", natural vaccination. This would give us an additional powerful tool against malaria," says Dr Steffen Borrmann. Dr Kai Matuschewski adds, "A major motivation for our study was to test a simple concept that can also be realised in malaria regions. We are convinced that weakened parasites offer the best protection against a complex parasitical disease such as malaria."
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments