Discovery of novel drug leads for malaria prevention and treatment Repurposing of compounds used as drugs/drug leads for cancer and other diseases as antimalarial agents Investigating malaria parasite epigenetics regulators to discover new therapeutic approaches for malaria Mode of action studies on novel antimalarial compounds

Human parasitic diseases cause major health and economic problems in many tropical and sub-tropical regions of the world. Each year significant morbidity and mortality arises due to infection with parasites that cause diseases such as malaria, schistosomiasis, and lymphatic filariasis. There are currently no vaccines available to prevent tropical parasitic diseases and prophylactic or therapeutic drugs are either failing due to parasite resistance or are just not available. Our work focuses on the worlds’ most lethal tropical parasitic disease, malaria, which is caused by Plasmodium parasites. Each year ~600,000 people, mainly children under the age of five, die of malaria. Malaria parasite drug resistance is a major problem and there is a large unmet need for the identification of new antimalarial drugs, in particular those with and novel modes of action. To address this, our group uses cross-disciplinary approaches to try to identify key weaknesses in the malaria parasite so that we can exploit them to develop new drug leads for malaria prevention and treatment.