Nanomalaria

The current activity of the Nanomalaria group is focused on the development of nanomedicine-based systems to be applied to malaria prophylaxis, diagnosis and therapy.

Methods for the diagnosis of malaria can benefit from nanotools applied to the design of microfluidic-based devices for the accurate identification of the parasite’s strain, its precise infective load, and the relative content of the different stages of its life cycle, whose knowledge is essential for the administration of adequate therapies.

Malaria is arguably one of the main medical concerns worldwide because of the numbers of people affected, the severity of the disease and the complexity of the life cycle of its causative agent, the protist Plasmodium spp. The clinical, social and economic burden of malaria has led for the last 100 years to several waves of serious efforts to reach its control and eventual eradication, without success to this day.

With the advent of nanoscience, renewed hopes have appeared of finally obtaining the long sought-after magic bullet against malaria in the form of a nanovector for the targeted delivery of antimalarial drugs exclusively to Plasmodium-infected cells. Nanotechnology can also be applied to the discovery of new antimalarials through single-molecule manipulation approaches for the identification of novel drugs targeting essential molecular components of the parasite.

The benefits and drawbacks of these nanosystems have to be considered in different possible scenarios, including economy-related issues that are hampering the progress of nanotechnology-based medicines against malaria with the dubious argument that they are too expensive to be used in developing areas. Unfortunately, it is true that the application of nanoscience to infectious disease has been traditionally neglected, with most research resources overwhelmingly biased towards other pathologies more prominent in the developed world. Thus, extra ingenuity is demanded from us: malaria-oriented nanomedicines not only need to work spotless; they have to do so in a cost-efficient way because they will be deployed in low-income regions.

The driving force of the Nanomalaria group is our personal commitment to applying nanomedicine to infectious diseases of poverty through several research lines: 

• Exploration of different types of encapsulating structure (liposomes, synthetic and natural polymers), targeting molecule (protein, polysaccharide, nucleic acid aptamers), and antimalarial compound (e.g. new structures derived from marine organisms and antimicrobial peptides) for the assembly of nanovectors capable of delivering their drug cargo with complete specificity to diseased cells. 
• Study of metabolic pathways present in Plasmodium but absent in humans, with the aim of identifying specific enzymes as therapeutic targets. 
• Use of glycosaminoglycans for innovative antimalarial strategies. 
• Design of new methods for the targeted drug delivery to Plasmodium stages in the mosquito vector. 
• Investigation of novel drugs against insect-borne diseases working through radically new mechanisms. 
• Extension of our activities to new pathologies (leishmaniasis). 

FIGURE 1. Top: female Anopheles gambiae mosquito. From: John Smart, A Handbook for the Identification of Insects of Medical Importance, British Museum, London, 1948. Bottom: Logo of the NANOpheles project (EURONANOMED III call) coordinated by the Nanomalaria Group.

FIGURE 2. Cover image of the PhD Thesis of Dr. Elisabet Martí Coma-Cros, Investigation of branched and linear polymers as oral delivery systems of antimalarial drugs. 2019. Universitat de Barcelona. Cover design by Mar Martí Coma-Cros.

• Zeiss Primostar microscope
• Shake ‘N’ Stack (Thermo Hybaid) hybridization oven
• Rotatory evaporator RS 3000-V (Selecta)
• Plasmodium falciparum cell cultures

• Prof. Dario Anselmetti
  Universität Bielefeld, Germany. Single molecule force spectroscopy
• Prof. Maria Antònia Busquets
  University of Barcelona, Spain
• Prof. Elisabetta Ranucci
  Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy
• Prof. José Manuel Bautista
  Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
• Dr. Matthias Rottmann
  Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, Basel, Switzerland
• Prof. Robert Sinden
  Imperial College London, UK
• Dr. Israel Molina
  Hospital Universitari Vall d’Hebron, Barcelona
• Prof. José Luis Serrano
  Instituto de Nanociencia de Aragón, Zaragoza
• Prof. Johan Engbersen
  University of Twente, The Netherlands
• Dr. Santiago Imperial
  University of Barcelona, Spain
• Dr. Eduardo Prata Vilanova
  Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Exploration of sulfated polysaccharides of marine origin as antimalarials
• Dr. Maria Manconi
  Università de Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy. Liposome technology
• Dr. Krijn Paaijmans
  CRESIB, Barcelona, Spain
• Dr. Ellen Faszewski
  Wheelock College, Boston, USA. Marine sponge cell adhesion
• Prof. Bernard Degnan
  University of Brisbane, Australia
• Dr. Francisco J. Muñoz
  Parc de Recerca Biomèdica de Barcelona, Spain. Amyloid diseases
• Dr. Inga Siden-Kiamos
  FORTH Institute of Molecular Biology & Biotechnology, Greece. Development of the malaria parasite within the mosquito
• Prof. Salvador Ventura
  Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, Spain. Aggregative proteins
• Dr. Juan José Valle-Delgado
  Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland. Atomic force microscopy
• Prof. Mats Wahlgren
  Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden
• Dr. Fatima Nogueira
  Instituto de Higiene e Medicina Tropical, Lisboa, Portugal. Antimalarial drug assays in Plasmodium-infected mosquitoes and mice. 
• Dr. Christian Grandfils
  University of Liège, Belgium. Biomaterials research. 
• Salvador Borros
  Institut Químic de Sarrià, Barcelona. Materials Chemistry 
• Paula Gomes
  Universidade do Porto, Portugal. Development of new antimalarial drugs
• José Antonio García Salcedo
  Instituto de Parasitología y Biomedicina “López-Neyra”, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Granada, Spain. Synthesis of chitosan nanoparticles
• Eva Baldrich
  Hospital Universitari Vall d’Hebron, Barcelona. Malaria diagnosis
• Kim Williamson
  Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, USA. Basic biology of bacterial, viral, and parasite diseases
• Teresa Sierra
  Instituto de Nanociencia de Aragón, Zaragoza, Spain. Dendrimer technology 
• Jos Paulusse
  University of Twente, The Netherlands. Encapsulation of peptides in tailor-made multifunctionalized nanocarriers and polyamidoamine-derived nanogels