ibecbarcelona.euThe Nanomalaria group is a joint unit affiliated with IBEC and the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), located in the Esther Koplowitz Centre near Hospital Clínic (Barcelona).
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About
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.
