Malaria causes nearly 600,000 deaths each year, many of which occur in children.Credit: Hajarah Nalwadda/Getty
Promising results from a new malaria drug offer hope against emerging drug resistance in Africa. In a clinical trial, ganaplacide–lumefantrine (GanLum) cured 97.4% of participants, outperforming an existing treatment, which cured 94%.
Novartis, the maker of GanLum, based in Basel, Switzerland, says it is in the process of submitting the drug for regulatory approval, and it could be available in 12–18 months. It would be the first new class of malaria drug approved in more than 25 years.
Tackling resistance
Malaria is caused by Plasmodium parasites and transmitted to people mainly through mosquito bites. It infects hundreds of millions of people and causes nearly 600,000 deaths each year, most of which occur in children under the age of five.
Currently, the most widely used malaria treatments rely on artemisinin, a plant-derived compound that rapidly kills malaria parasites. But partial resistance to this compound has been identified in southeast Asia and several African countries. “There is a great need for non-artemisinin-based drugs to treat malaria,” says Philip Rosenthal, a malaria specialist at the University of California, San Francisco.
Although it’s not clear whether this resistance is causing treatment failures, having alternatives is important in case current therapies lose effectiveness. For that reason, GanLum moving towards approval gives a “tremendous sense of relief”, says George Jagoe, executive vice-president at Medicines for Malaria Venture, an organization in Geneva, Switzerland, focused on increasing access to new malaria treatments. It collaborated with Novartis to develop the therapy, providing financial and scientific support.
The clinical-trial results were presented today at the American Society of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene (ASTMH) annual meeting in Toronto, Canada. Researchers compared GanLum with artemether–lumefantrine, a standard artemisinin-based treatment for malaria. The trial included 1,688 adults and children with malaria in 12 countries across sub-Saharan Africa.
Transmission block
Data from the study showed that GanLum could clear parasites with a mutation associated with artemisinin resistance in around 47 hours, much faster than the standard treatment, which took around 71 hours.
