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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Applications:
INTERNATIONAL GRID EFFORT LAUNCHED
TO FIGHT MALARIA
The Rothberg Institute for Childhood Diseases (TRI), a non-profit research
institute devoted to discovering medicines for orphan childhood diseases such
as Tuberous Sclerosis Complex (TSC), announced the release of the first
Malaria target to an international community of more than 54,000 users from 93
countries currently running the Drug Design and Optimization Laboratory
software (D2OL).
"While TRI focuses all of its laboratory efforts on making therapeutics to
cure TSC, we see strong synergy in expanding our computational resources to
support efforts directed towards emerging pathogens, bio-terrorism threats and
Third World diseases. This Malaria target was selected to help us test our
methods while providing valuable results for the development of medicines
against the parasite causing this devastating disease," stated Wolfgang Hinz,
senior research scientist at the Rothberg Institute for Childhood Diseases.
Results from this study can be used to prioritize the screening of drug-like
compounds against the parasite and will be made freely available to the
community and collaborating laboratories.
Increasing resistance against previously successful therapeutics which
targets
the parasite in the blood stage of the life cycle prompted the scientists at
TRI to select Plasmepsin II, a protease essential for the parasites survival
in the red blood cell. Successful development of inhibitors of proteases (for
example HIV-1 protease) further supports the choice of target.
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