By Alison Roach
SFU’s Brinkman Laboratory collaborates with international team
An international team of researchers including SFU scientists has developed a new therapy that treats the critically damaging effects of malaria. Though antimalarial drugs designed to prevent and treat the infectious disease do already exist, in reality they only solve part of the problem. Given on their own, antimalarial drugs fail in about one of every four cases of severe malaria, mainly because patients were already suffering from advanced stages of the sickness by the time they were brought to a hospital for treatment. The research, led by Australia’s Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, is also partially attributed to The Brinkman Laboratory at SFU.
“With severe malaria, and many other types of infections, it is actually the body’s response to the infection going too overblown that can cause the severe disease and death; the body literally starts severely damaging itself as it tries to attack the disease-causing microbe,” said Dr. Fiona Brinkman, an SFU professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry and the head of The Brinkman Laboratory.
Specifically, the new therapy developed is a peptide that acts as an immune-modulator, lessening the damaging inflammation in the body. The treatment could mean significantly improving chances of survival for people struck with the most devastating cases of malaria. In these advanced cases, the disease causes inflammation in the patient which can damage organs. The new drug treatment has been through successful initial testing, but still needs to go through several phases of clinical trials before it’s ready to be made available publically.
One major innovation of the drug was how it was developed. The researchers at The Brinkman Laboratory concentrate on the emerging field of Pathogenomics in their work. The lab uses this new approach in the study pathogens, which involves combining genomics — the study of the genomes of an organism — and bioinformatics — the application of computer science and information technology to biology and medicine. Using this new approach of algorithms, databases, and information systems applied to biological and medicinal science, the research team developed a database and analysis platform, called InnateDB. As Brinkman explained, the program was “used to provide unique insights into the data not possible through more basic analysis approaches.”
Brinkman believes that the combination of an antibiotic and an immune-modulator “may reflect a fundamental shift toward different approaches to infectious disease control. Rather than just providing an antibiotic/anti-malarial that kills the microbe, this kind of approach allows treatment to more effectively target the real problem. . . . This kind of approach could be potentially developed in the future to much more effectively treat a whole range of infectious diseases.”
This discovery is an instance of targeting both the underlying problem as well as the serious symptoms caused by it. This new method of approaching infectious disease also comes at a critical point in time.
“Antibiotic resistance is increasingly alarming, leading to more treatment failures and higher costs for more expensive drug regimes. As described by the World Health Organization and others, we are in a ‘race against time to develop new antibiotics’. This kind of approach of using an immune modulator is really promising as it may be less subject to antimicrobial resistance since it isn’t actually killing the microbe, but rather it targets the real source of the problem—ourselves and our immune system,” stated Brinkman.
