Drug Development against Severe Malaria

A recovery from malaria can be expected when effective antimalarial treatment is provided. However,  patients may also develop severe malaria with accompanying bacterial infections and high lethality. The disease progression to severe malaria might take days, but can also occur as early as within a few hours.
Severe malaria usually manifests with one or more of the following symptoms: coma, metabolic acidosis, severe anaemia, hypoglycaemia, acute renal failure or acute pulmonary oedema. If left untreated, severe malaria is fatal in the majority of cases.
DMG is developing an injectible triple combination of proven drugs to treat severe malaria which is expected to enter first clinical trials soon.

DMG is developing a second new antimalarial therapy together with the Institute for Tropical Medicine at the University of Tübingen. The triple combination therapy consists of three proven drugs: fosmidomycin, clindamycin and artesunate. It aims at improving the outcome of the severe and life-threatening form of the Plasmodium falciparum malaria that is accompanied by concomitant bacteriaemia. While fosmidomycin inhibits a vital metabolic pathway of the malaria parasite, clindamycin halts the parasite's reproduction by binding to the ribosomes which are essential for protein biosynthesis.
All three substances have a short half-life but high efficacy, and the contribution of each of the compounds of this combination is expected to ameliorate and shorten the duration of the highly needed treatment.
Together, fosmidomycin and the successful antibiotic clindamycin cover a wide range of gram-negative and gram-positive bacteria, and also possess excellent intrinsic synergistic antimalarial activity additive to artesunate, which was included in the World Health Organisation's list of essential medicines in 2002.
The development programme of the triple combination of DMG Deutsche Malaria GmbH is funded by a loan from the EU Malaria Fund.