Antimalarial drug discovery: screening of Brazilian medicinal plants and purified compounds

Background: Malaria is the most important parasitic disease and its control depends on specific chemotherapy, now complicated by Plasmodium falciparum that has become resistant to most commonly available antimalarials. Treatment of the disease requires quinine or drug combinations of artemisinin derivatives and other antimalarials. Further drug resistance is expected. New active compounds need to be discovered. Objective/method: To find new antimalarials from medicinal and randomly collected plants, crude extracts are screened against P falciparum in cultures and in malaria animal models, following bioassays of purified fractions, and cytotoxicity tests. Conclusion: For antimalarial research, screening medicinal plants is more efficient than screening randomly chosen plants. Biomonitored fractionation allows selection of new active molecules identified as potential antimalarials in multidisciplinary projects in Brazil; no new molecule is available for human testing, The advantages of projects based on ethnopharmacology are discussed.