What began your hunt for antimalarial drugs?
In the 1990s malaria cases were increasing in Brazil and the rest of the world. The natural antimalarial, artemisinin, from the sweet wormwood plant (Artemisia annua) offered great hope, but the new generation of drugs was being developed only semi-synthetically: artemisinin had to be isolated from plants, then transformed into derivatives using synthetic reactions.
This got me interested in plants as sources of antimalarial compounds. After I got a job in Manaus, in the middle of the Brazilian Amazon, I began to focus on plants as the best potential source.
Why is it so important to find new weapons against malaria?
Approximately 200 million people get malaria and just under a million people die from it each year worldwide. There is still no effective, affordable vaccine on the horizon, and malaria parasites become resistant to the drugs over time. New therapies have been introduced in ...
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