Every year, more than 200 million people are infected with malaria, and nearly 500,000 die from the disease. Existing drugs can treat the infection, but the parasite that causes the disease has evolved resistance to many of them. To help overcome that resistance, scientists are now searching for drugs that hit novel molecular targets within the Plasmodium falciparum parasite that causes malaria. An international team that includes MIT researchers has identified a potential new target: the acetyl-CoA synthetase, an enzyme that is necessary for the parasite’s survival. They found that…
