Mosquito infection studies with Aotus monkeys and humans infected with the Chesson strain of Plasmodiun vivax

Phenotypic Screening of Small Molecules with Antimalarial Activity for Three Different Parasitic Life Stages

Malaria remains one of the deadliest infectious diseases globally. Available therapeutic agents are already limited in their efficacy, and drug resistance threatens to diminish further our ability to prevent and treat the disease. Despite a renewed effort to identify compounds with antimalarial activity, the drug discovery and development pipeline lacks target diversity and availability of compounds that target liver- and gametocyte-stage parasites. Phenotypic screens are a powerful and valuable tool for identifying new chemical compounds with antimalarial activity. This chapter highlights recent phenotypic screening methodologies for all three parasitic life stages.

Malariotherapy--insanity at the service of malariology

From the early 1920s until the advent of penicillin in the mid 1940s, a clinical course of malaria was the only effective treatment of general paresis, a common manifestation of tertiary syphilis that was nearly always fatal. For a number of reasons, Plasmodium vivax became the parasite species most often employed for what became known as malariotherapy. This provided an opportunity, probably unique in the annals of medicine, to observe and investigate the biology, immunology and clinical evolution of a dangerous human pathogen in its natural host. There is little doubt that the lessons learned from these studies influenced the malaria research and control agendas. It is equally true that over the last 40 years, the insights afforded by malariotherapy have remained largely undisturbed on the dusty shelves of institutional libraries. In this chapter, we broadly review the published data derived from malariotherapy, and discuss its relevance to current challenges of P. vivax epidemiology, immunology and pathology.