Drug target selection for malaria: Molecular basis for the drug discovery process
Clement Olatunbosun Bewaji · 2014
Diseases such as Malaria, Tuberculosis, Trypanosomosis and HIV/AIDS are prevalent in Africa. These are life-threatening dis eases transmitted from person to person directly or through different parasites. The most lethal for m of malaria is caused by the parasite Plasmodium falciparum (PF). The increasing problem of parasite resistanc e to currently used anti- malarials has led to an urgent need to develop new and effective antimalarial drugs. The enormous pressure that the pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies are facing has created the need to apply all available techniques to decrease attrition rates, costs and the time to bring drugs to the market. Currently, two of the wi dely applied techniques in drug discovery are computational chemistry and molecular modeling. In this paper, we present a list of potential drug targets for malaria which can be further investigat ed to see if they can be synthesized into drugs.