A new study carried out in the laboratory of Dr. Jacob Polak from the Shraga Segal Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Faculty of Health Sciences of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev opens a promising direction in curing malaria.
In Dr. Polk's laboratory, the focus is on the study of the main protein responsible for the serious effects of malaria. This protein, called PFEMP1, is encoded by a family of 60 genes, which are only slightly different from one another. The presence of this protein results in red blood cells infected with the parasite sticking to the inner walls of the patient's small blood vessels, which leads to their blockage and as a result to the stormy clinical picture of the disease.
At any given time, only one copy of the family is expressed and the parasite is able to replace the expressed copy from time to time, which allows it to escape the immune system. The mechanism by which this replacement is carried out is partially known, but the factors leading to its activation have not yet been clarified.
In the new study, which applies technologies of monitoring gene expression, it was found that biological stress activates a mechanism in which this exchange takes place. It was also found that this activation depends on the activity of an enzyme present in the parasite and responsible for changes in its DNA structure.
Dr. Pollak: "Since the activity of this enzyme can be controlled by medicinal substances, it is possible to use them to influence the expression of this group of genes. For example, it was found that resveratrol, a natural substance found in red wine and peanuts, causes an almost complete reduction in the expression of these genes in doses that are not at all toxic to the patient's body. This substance can be a new, safe and cheap drug to bring relief to the severe clinical symptoms of this disease."
This research work, which was recently published in the journal PLOS ONE, opens, as mentioned, a new direction in the field of curing malaria. The research is the result of the work of the master's degree students Amir Ben-Shamuel and Osherit Shalu and the PhD student Eli Rosenberg and was done in collaboration with one of the top malaria researchers in the world - Prof. Alan Cowman from the Walter and Eliza Hall Medical Research Institute, Melbourne, Australia.
It should be noted that malaria is a disease that causes annual morbidity to the extent of about five hundred million people in third world countries and the death of about two million - most of them children under the age of five. There is no vaccine against the disease and resistance to the common antimalarial drugs is spreading. Therefore, there is a real and urgent need to develop new ways to deal with the disease.
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