Ambroise-Thomas P
Département de Parasitologie-Mycologie Médicale et Moléculaire, EP 78 CNRS, Faculté de médecine de Grenoble, France.
Med Trop (Mars). 1995;55(4 Suppl):23-6.
Research in new antimalarial drugs has too long been limited to a only pharmacological approach with its four main modalities: isolation of compounds from medicinal plants, oriented or not screening of varied molecules, molecular ingeniery modifying structure of wellknown drugs in order to improve their efficacy, products reversing resistance to antimalarial drugs (anti-Pfmdr). Important success has been obtained by these ways but the possibility of new discoveries seems to be limited. It is time certainly to concentrate efforts no more on the drug itself but on the real target i.e. Plasmodium or malaria disease. Our knowledge of Plasmodium biology and of pathophysiological mechanisms in malaria are still very limited. This kind of study comes up against many difficulties (plasmodial intracellular parasitism, parasitic specificity of Plasmodium parasites in Man, etc). Nevertheless, only a huge effort in fundamental research will open new perspectives in antimalarial therapeutics by identifying possible targets for new compounds from which pharmaccutal industry will be able to develop new medicines.
新型抗疟药物的研究长期以来一直局限于单一的药理学方法，该方法有四种主要模式：从药用植物中分离化合物、对各种分子进行有针对性或无针对性的筛选、通过分子工程改造知名药物的结构以提高其疗效、研发逆转疟原虫对抗疟药物耐药性的产品（抗Pfmdr）。通过这些方法已经取得了重要成果，但新发现的可能性似乎有限。现在肯定是时候不再将精力集中在药物本身，而是集中在真正的靶点上，即疟原虫或疟疾疾病。我们对疟原虫生物学以及疟疾病理生理机制的了解仍然非常有限。这类研究面临许多困难（疟原虫的细胞内寄生、疟原虫在人类体内的寄生特异性等）。然而，只有在基础研究方面付出巨大努力，通过识别新化合物的可能靶点，才能为抗疟治疗开辟新的前景，制药行业将能够据此开发新药。
