Pharmacovigilence &Resistance &Treatment Bill Brieger | 23 Aug 2009 06:09 am
Enhancing artemisinin production – on a fast track
With reports from Southeast Asia of resistance by malaria parasites to artemisinin-based drugs, the race is on to guarantee adequate supplies of these medicines for appropriate treatment in the most endemic areas of the world. As PBS phrases it, resistance “now threatens to outfox medicine’s last line of effective drugs.”
According to WHO this could reverse the “Huge strides have been made in the past 10 years to reduce the burden of malaria, one of the world’s major killer diseases.” The challenge, as WHO makes clear, includes providing adequate supplies of artemisinin-based combination therapy (ACT), which are used only on parasitologically confirmed cases of malaria and with guarantees that the full, correct does is consumed.
As a natural product, artemisinin has not been easy to produce and store in quantities needed for large scale control programs. The BBC recently posted an video on efforts to grow Artemisia annua with enhanced artemisinin content. The video explains techniques that were used to breed the plant far more quickly than traditional methods using “fast track molecular methods.” The new plants are being disseminated for field testing to parts of the world where the plant is being grown commercially.
Keeping ahead of resistance requires not only better and faster supplies of ACTs to the front line. There is also need for drug response surveillance, health education on correct treatment practices and continued vector control efforts.
We should also remember another approach to artemisinin production. A group at the University of California, Berkeley, “has been refining their method of engineering E. coli and yeast to produce a chemical precursor of artemisinin – the most effective malaria treatment available. Artemisinin is sorely needed in the developing world, but too expensive to produce to be affordable.” Not only could such approaches yield more affordable medicines, but could also eventually engineer a form of medicine for which parasites are not resistant
The race is on – will we be able to disseminate enough ACT supplies to make a major dent in malaria morbidity, mortality and especially prevalence before resistant parasites win their own race across the continents from Asia to Africa has happened with chloroquine and sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine?
The biggest threat may not be drug resistance or insecticide resistance but bureaucratic resistance that threatens timely scale-up and sustained implementation of our available interventions, which are the precursors to malaria elimination.