Question: have you been successfull on finding any cures 4 it if so what are they?

Ailsa Powell answered on 13 Jun 2011:

Hello,
This is a good question, so I wanted to make sure I had enough time to answer properly.

I haven’t found any cures for Malaria, but that doesn’t mean that some of the work I do won’t lead to a treatment.

The process of developing new medicines is enormous and involves hundreds of people, many, many years and a lot of money. I’m right at the starting point of the process, in the group I work in I we have spotted a potential weakness in the Malaria parasite and we think it might be possible to exploit that and use it to treat Malaria. So my job is to find out as much as I can about the protein that is this weak spot. Any information I find out I share with the other people I work with in different universities and if we find anything useful you can bet that a big pharmaceutical company will jump on board and put in the money to help develop the drug – but even that doesn’t mean that it will be a successful cure as it will have to go through many years of improvement and testing to see if it does work as we hoped and that it doesn’t have too many nasty side affects. And by this point my role will have been over for years and I will have moved on to the next problem again figuring out the start point of developing treatments.

It can take up to 20years to get new drug treatments onto the market and will have involved university labs like the one I work in and the big pharmaceuticals too. I’m basically a small cog in a gigantic machine 🙂

I hope that gives you an idea about how new cures are developed and how many people and stages are involved.