“Artemisinins are drugs that are made from a plant called sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua). Artemisinins work against malaria parasites that have become resistant to other drugs.”

It’s a completely new way of thinking about artemisinins which also provides new methods to study these drugs.

I first started this line of research (looking at parasite pumps) when I was doing my Ph.D. studies more than a decade ago. It took quite a long time to work out the best system to study parasite pumps. We use frogs’ eggs, but there are some tricks needed to get them to make pumps of the malaria parasite. Ironing out those wrinkles took a few years.

Artemisinin use is increasing greatly, and there is strong political and financial support for providing artemisinins in combination with other types of antimalarial substances to treat malaria effectively. Drug resistance in malaria parasites has made most other antimalarials pretty ineffective. So understanding how these drugs work can make a big difference to how we look out for development of resistance and what the mechanisms of resistance might be. We now have the chance to design our way out of the resistance problem by using our knowledge of the target for artemisinins.

Sanjeev Krishna
Professor of Molecular Parasitology and Medicine
Division of Cellular and Molecular Medicine
Centre for Infection
St. George’s Hospital
University of London
London, UK