The August issue of the internationally important journal "Journal of Medical Chemistry" published a study by researchers of the Latvian Institute of Organic Synthesis and Malaria Biochemistry Laboratory, Francis Crick Institute (Great Britain) on new solutions in the treatment of malaria.
One of the creators of the work is a researcher of the Institute of Organic Synthesis of Latvia, Ph.D. Elīna Līdumniece. She is the author of the discovery, on the basis of which further international research of potential medicinal substances continues. Including the newly published joint work of Latvian and British chemical researchers in the journal "Journal or Medicinal Chemistry". In 2023, the researcher defended her doctoral thesis "Creation of Malaria Enzyme Inhibitors".
Malaria is transmitted by malaria mosquitoes, which mainly live in Africa, India, South Asia and other tropical and subtropical countries. About 250 million people fall ill every year from infections carried by these insects. The symptoms of malaria are similar to flu - fever, headache, fatigue, sometimes nausea, but its consequences are often fatal due to frequent complications.
Although anti-malarial drugs are available and, when traveling to high-risk countries, Latvian travelers are also encouraged to use them prophylactically, disease resistance to existing drugs, or their effectiveness is not sufficient, has been observed more and more often. Elīna Līdumiece is among those researchers who tackled this problem in search of new potentially effective medicinal substances.
"From a newly invented compound - discovery - to medicine is a very long and very expensive way," says the young researcher. "Currently, we (researchers) continue to improve the structure of the newly created compound so that it is more targeted and less active on other enzymes in our body," said Elīna Līdumniece.
The new study, conducted jointly with British colleagues, confirms that borolactone-containing peptides are promising lead compounds for the development of new antimalarial drugs targeting the inhibition of the malarial serine protease SUB1, showing high selectivity and low cytotoxicity.
Elīna Līdumniece received the recognition of the Latvian Academy of Sciences and the award of Solomon Hiller - an outstanding chemist and the founder of the Institute of Organic Synthesis of Latvia - for the work "Creation of Malaria Enzyme Inhibitors".
Photo: the Institute of Organic Synthesis of Latvia