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Few readers of Naturally Selected or F1000 users can be unaware of the huge health burden caused by malaria–an estimated 800,000 deaths and 225 million cases worldwide in 2010. Possibly less well appreciated is the parlous state of effective treatment strategies: the current first-line treatment for Plasmodium falciparum currently relies on a single drug class (artemisinin), and resistance to that is becoming apparent.It’s not all doom and gloom: new drugs are in the pipeline, even though they’re not expected to translate into consumer drugs for another 10 to 15 years. Still, new strategies are urgently needed to combat malaria, perhaps focussing on the apicoplast (see this evaluation of an intriguing paper by Ellen Yeh and Joe DeRisi at Stanford, describing a crucial role for this relict organelle in the parasite’s blood stage).

For an overview of the problems, and a description of how the problem of anti-malarials is being tackled, see our latest F1000 Biology Report by Charlotte Hobbs and Patrick Duffy at the NIH/NIAID Laboratory of Malaria Immunology and Vaccinology, Rockville:

Drugs for malaria: something old, something new, something borrowed. As with all Reports, this one covers latest developments in the field and is completely open access to boot.