London, Jan 18 (PTI) An artificially-intelligent 'robotscientist' has helped identify a common toothpaste ingredientthat can fight strains of malaria parasite that have grownresistant currently-used drugs.
Malaria kills over half a million people each year,predominantly in Africa and south-east Asia.
While a number of medicines are used to treat thedisease, malaria parasites are growing increasingly resistantto these drugs, raising the spectre of untreatable malaria inthe future.
The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports,employed the robot scientist 'Eve' in a high-throughput screenand discovered that triclosan, an ingredient found in manytoothpastes, may help the fight against drug-resistance.
When used in toothpaste, triclosan prevents the build-upof plaque bacteria by inhibiting the action of an enzyme knownas enoyl reductase (ENR), which is involved in the productionof fatty acids.
Scientists have known for some time that triclosan alsoinhibits the growth in culture of the malaria parasitePlasmodium during the blood-stage, and assumed that this wasbecause it was targeting ENR, which is found in the liver.
Working with 'Eve', researchers from University ofCambridge in the UK discovered that in fact, triclosan affectsparasite growth by specifically inhibiting an entirelydifferent enzyme of the malaria parasite, called DHFR.
DHFR is the target of a well-established antimalarialdrug, pyrimethamine; however, resistance to the drug amongmalaria parasites is common, particularly in Africa.
Researchers showed that triclosan was able to target andact on this enzyme even in pyrimethamine-resistant parasites.
"Drug-resistant malaria is becoming an increasinglysignificant threat in Africa and south-east Asia, and ourmedicine chest of effective treatments is slowly depleting,"said Professor Steve Oliver from Cambridge.
Robot scientist Eve was developed by a team of scientistsat the Universities of Manchester and Cambridge in the UK tospeed up the drug discovery process by automaticallydeveloping and testing hypotheses to explain observations, runexperiments using laboratory robotics, interpret the results.
"Artificial intelligence and machine learning enables usto create automated scientists that do not just take a 'bruteforce' approach, but rather take an intelligent approach toscience. This could greatly speed up the drug discoveryprogress and potentially reap huge rewards," said Ross Kingfrom University of Manchester. PTI MHNMHN.
This is unedited, unformatted feed from the Press Trust of India wire.