Microbial hara-kiri: Exploiting lysosomal cell death in malaria parasites

Authors:

Jun-Hong Ch’ng1,2, Johan Ursing2 and Kevin Shyong-Wei Tan1
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Affiliations:

1 Department of Microbiology, National University of Singapore, Singapore.

2 Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden.

Keywords: 

malaria, Plasmodium falciparum, chloroquine, lysosomal cell death, programmed cell death, digestive vacuole, repositioning

Related Article(s)? 

Ch'ng JH, Lee YQ, Gun SY, Chia WN, Chang ZW, Wong LK, Batty KT, Russell B, Nosten F, Renia L, Tan KSW. Validation of a chloroquine-induced cell death mechanism for clinical use against malaria. Cell Death Dis 5, e1305., 10.1038/cddis.2014.265

Corresponding Author(s):

Ch’ng JH, Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology (MTC), Karolinska Institutet, Nobels väg 16, KI Solna Campus, Box 280; SE-171 77 Stockholm, Sweden chngjunhong@hotmail.com Tan KSW, Department of Microbiology, National University of Singapore, 5 Science Drive 2; Singapore 117597, Singapore kevin_tan@nuhs.edu.sg

Conflict of interest statement:

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Please cite this article as:

Jun-Hong Ch’ng, Johan Ursing and Kevin Shyong-Wei Tan (2015). Microbial hara-kiri: Exploiting lysosomal cell death in malaria parasites. Microbial Cell 2(2): 57-58.

© 2015 Ch’ng et al. This is an open-access article released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows the unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are acknowledged.

Abstract:

The antimalarial drug chloroquine (CQ) has been sidelined in the fight against falciparum malaria due to wide-spread CQ resistance. Replacement drugs like sulfadoxine, pyrimethamine and mefloquine have also since been surpassed with the evolution of multi-drug resistant parasites. Even the currently recommended artemisinin-based combination therapies show signs of compromise due to the recent spread of artemisinin delayed-clearance parasites. Though there have been promising breakthroughs in the pursuit of new effective antimalarials, the development and strategic deployment of such novel chemical entities takes time. We therefore argue that there is a crucial need to re-examine the usefulness of ‘outdated’ drugs like chloroquine, and explore if they might be effective alternative therapies in the interim. We suggest that a novel parasite cell death (pCD) pathway may be exploited through the reformulation of CQ to address this need.

doi: 10.15698/mic2015.02.186
Volume 2, pp. 57 to 58, published 12/01/2015.