Last Updated: 17/11/2025
Development of novel antimalarial therapeutics targeting Plasmodium falciparum lipid-binding proteins
Objectives
This project hopes to design drug-like molecules that could precisely target specific proteins with lipid-binding modules associated with the drivers of antimalarial drug resistance. Also, the project will engage community members with the aim of bridging the gap between researchers and the communities while emphasizing their participations during field sampling in the current drive-out malaria efforts.
The project is expected to recruit and graduate three MSc and 2 PhD students.
This project works towards biophysical characterisation of the individual protein-binding events to illuminate their avidity or selectivity toward lipids and define the essentiality of genes encoding Plasmodium falciparum lipid-binding proteins (PfLBPs) in phosphoinositide signalling pathway. We plan to obtain deeper mechanistic insights on how protein-lipid interactions mediate a plethora of cellular effects by solving the crystal structure of the recombinant PfLBPs. Also, we will characterise the structural determinants involved in the interaction between the PfLBPs and PIPs which should inform downstream drug design approaches. We will build on these strategic approaches by testing newly synthesised drug-like molecules in parasite growth inhibitory assays and establish their potency against drug-resistant parasites, with the sole aim of providing baseline data for hit-to-lead development of PfLBP-based inhibitors.
Jan 2024 — Dec 2028
$205,000
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