Issue date: 1/15/07 Section: Campus

By Day Greenberg
The Daily Northwestern

Blood pressure medicine could be the new weapon in the fight against malaria, according to research from the Feinberg School of Medicine.

Dr. Kasturi Haldar and her research group found that propranolol - a kind of drug known as a beta-blocker used to treat high blood pressure - makes anti-malarial drugs dramatically more effective when the drugs are used together.

The group is now testing combinations of anti-malaria drugs and propranolol for mass distribution in the future.

Haldar's group, which worked with the New York Blood Center for the project, wanted to address two problems with methods of malaria chemotherapy. The first problem is that the parasites quickly build up a resistance to drugs.

"We are running out of antibacterials," Haldar said. "This is the same problem with parasites."

Another problem, Haldar said, is that anti-malaria drugs only fight the parasite after it enters the blood. Haldar wanted to find a way to prevent symptoms of malaria.

Malaria is a disease that infects between 300 million and 500 million people a year, with 1,300 U.S. cases reported annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There is no vaccine to prevent it.

More than one million people die every year from the most dangerous of the four forms, caused by the one-celled protozoan parasites called Plasmodium falciparum. Haldar's group studied these parasites and how they invade red blood cells.

Haldar's group targeted a protein signaling system that the parasites use to enter red blood cells. Without access to this system, the parasites die. Researchers used propranolol to block the activity of G-proteins in red blood cells, blocking entry for about 70 to 80 percent of the parasites. The remaining parasites that enter the red blood cells are then killed within.

As a result, using propranolol greatly reduced the needed doses of anti-malarial drugs.

Continued...

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