Target identification of PyAz90, a new antimalarial compound

• Grant number: 22/01514-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate (Direct)
• Start date: September 19, 2022
• End date: September 11, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Biological Sciences - Biochemistry - Molecular Biology
• Principal Investigator: Daniel Youssef Bargieri
• Grantee: Juliana Calit Paim
• Supervisor: Kim C. Williamson
• Host Institution: Instituto de Ciências Biomédicas (ICB). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, United States
• Associated to the scholarship: 18/24878-9 - Search for Plasmodium transmission-blocking compounds using new experimental models, BP.DD

Abstract

Malaria is a preventable, diagnosable, and treatable disease. Nevertheless, it causes thousands of deaths every year, and millions of people are still endangered. There is an urgent need to eliminate malaria since drug resistance is reappearing. There is general agreement that elimination is not simply a matter of intensifying the use of available tools. New strategies, like transmission-blocking, will be required. Our lab has focused on the search for transmission blocking (TB) compounds. The FAPESP Ph.D. project proposes using a new tool developed to screen in high throughput compound libraries and identifying new TB compounds. Among the newly identified compounds, one of them (PyAz90) represents a class of compounds with unknown antiplasmodial activity. Here we propose a BEPE fellowship that will allow us to develop more studies with PyAz90, which already showed an expressive capacity to block transmission, and also inhibits asexual stages of Plasmodium falciparum in vitro. (AU)