Abstract
Malaria is a ubiquitous disease that can affect more than 40% of the world’s population who live with some risk of contracting this disease. The World Health Organization (WHO) has recently highlighted the high spread of this disease in Sub-Saharan Africa. Despite the considerable fall in mortality rate over the past decade, the development of resistance against main treatment strategies still exists. This problem has provoked scientific efforts to develop various treatment strategies including use of vaccines, drug delivery systems, and biotherapeutics approaches. A vaccination strategy is being implemented to trigger direct clearance of the causative parasites from the human host. However, the complex life-cycle of Plasmodium parasites with continuous antigenic mutations has partly hindered this approach so far. The application of different types of drug delivery systems for the delivery of antimalarial drugs is also being considered in order to improve the efficacy, pharmacokinetics, tolerability, and reduce toxicity of existing anti-malarial drugs. A third approach has emerged from the high success of antibodies to treat complex diseases like cancer and autoimmune diseases. Various antibody engineering methods and formats have been proposed to tackle the notable sophisticated lifecycle of malaria. Within the malaria research field, the characteristics of these diverse treatment strategies, individually, are broadly acknowledged. This review article considers the current status of these approaches and the future outlook.
Highlights
Malaria is an infectious disease that is caused by the parasite Plasmodium
Malaria is a ubiquitous disease that can affect more than 40% of the world’s population who live with some risk of contracting this disease
The World Health Organization (WHO) 2015 Fact Sheet reported that over 15 years from 2000-2015, there was a global reduction in malaria incidence ratesand mortality by 37% and 60%, respectively
Summary
Malaria is an infectious disease that is caused by the parasite Plasmodium. This transmittable disease affects around 200 million annually, killing about 650,000 people per year, especially children less than 5 years old living in sub-Saharan Africa [1]. The subsequent Fact Sheet in 2016 confirmed the emergence of parasite resistance to antimalarial medicines and mosquito resistance to insecticides, which could trigger a rise in global malaria mortality if ignored. There is an urgent requirement to identify new treatment strategies against malaria [7] These approaches have been directed towards enhancing the characterisation of natural products, adaptation of effective vaccine and drug delivery strategies, and the development of specific biotherapeutic agents [8,9,10,11,12,13]. The main objective of this article is to review the anti-malarial role of bio- therapeutic formulations, and to evaluate their potential as effective treatments to malaria in the future
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