Carucci D J
Malaria Program, Naval Medical Research Center, 503 Robert Grant Avenue, Silver Spring, MD 20910, USA.
Pharmacogenomics. 2001 May;2(2):137-42. doi: 10.1517/14622416.2.2.137.
Infection with any of the four species of Plasmodium single cell parasites that infects humans causes the clinical disease, malaria. Of these, it is Plasmodium falciparum that is responsible for the majority of the 1.5-2.3 million deaths due to this disease each year. Worldwide there are between 300-500 million cases of malaria annually. To date there is no licensed vaccine and resistance to most of the available drugs used to prevent and/or treat malaria is spreading. There is therefore an urgent need to develop new and effective drugs and vaccines against this devastating parasite. We have outlined a strategy using a combination of DNA-based vaccines and the data derived from the soon-to-be completed P. falciparum genome and the genomes of other species of Plasmodium to develop new vaccines against malaria. Much of the technology that we are developing for vaccine target identification is directly applicable to the identification of potential targets for drug discovery. The publicly available genome sequence data also provides a means for researchers whose focus may not be primarily malaria to leverage their research on cancer, yeast biology and other research areas to the biological problems of malaria.
感染人类的四种疟原虫单细胞寄生虫中的任何一种都会引发临床疾病——疟疾。其中，每年因这种疾病导致的150万至230万人死亡，主要是由恶性疟原虫造成的。全球每年有3亿至5亿例疟疾病例。迄今为止，尚无获得许可的疫苗，而且用于预防和/或治疗疟疾的大多数现有药物的耐药性正在蔓延。因此，迫切需要研发针对这种毁灭性寄生虫的新型有效药物和疫苗。我们已经概述了一种策略，即结合基于DNA的疫苗以及即将完成的恶性疟原虫基因组和其他疟原虫物种基因组所获得的数据，来研发抗疟疾的新型疫苗。我们正在开发的用于疫苗靶点识别的许多技术可直接应用于药物发现潜在靶点的识别。公开可用的基因组序列数据也为那些研究重点可能并非主要是疟疾的研究人员提供了一种手段，使他们能够将其在癌症、酵母生物学和其他研究领域的研究应用于疟疾的生物学问题。
