SRI today announced that researchers are developing a new treatment that aims to provide a better option to fight malaria , particularly for people in low-income and rural regions. Researchers in SRI's Pharmaceutical Sciences Lab are working on an affordable, shelf-stable anti-malarial drug formulation that could provide months of protection against the mosquito-borne disease with just a single injection, which means that individuals would no longer have to worry about missing a dose. Additionally, it has a low propensity for resistance and can be effective where drug resistance exists.
Current malaria prevention drugs have issues -; resistance, patient compliance, cost, distribution -; but we have high hopes that this drug can address these obstacles. I dream that we can finally eradicate malaria, and I believe we're on the path to do that." Gita Shankar, Senior Director of the Pharmaceutical Sciences Lab at SRI Typically, treatments come as pills that must be taken daily or weekly.
The costs of the medication can be a burden, and people often have trouble adhering to the treatment regimen because they miss doses or take the pills at the wrong time. The World Health Organization has reported that in part due to incomplete treatments, malarial parasites in some regions have developed resistance to multiple anti-malarial drugs, making them less effective. In a paper published in the European Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences , Shankar and her colleagues demonstrated that thei.