Researchers have identified a region of the malaria-parasite genome that underlies resistance to the most effective current treatment. The finding comes as drug resistance seems to be spreading in Southeast Asia.
Artemisinin has become the go-to treatment nearly everywhere that malaria is endemic. Resistance to it was first identified in 2005 in western Cambodia. Resistance does not necessarily cause artemisinin treatment to fail completely, but it does slow the clearance of the malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium falciparum from patients' blood.
To find the causes of artemisinin resistance, Ian Cheeseman, a geneticist at the Texas Biomedical Research Institute in San Antonio, and his colleagues compared Cambodian, Thai and Laotian P. falciparumpopulations that had differing clearance rates after artemisinin treatment. Their results are published inScience today1.Researchers are concerned that artemisinin-resistant strains of P. falciparum
