Scientist gets bt3.4m for anti-malarial work

Bongkoch was the only scientist from Southeast Asia to be selected for the Grand Challenges Exploration for this year, and only the

second Thai scientist to receive this award after her predecessor received it last year to discover a new method to control dengue fever outbreaks.

Bongkoch started her scientific career in 1993 after graduating with a doctoral degree from Mahidol University. Her research interest is antimalarial compounds. She has had 15 articles published in international journals.

She will spend a year on designing and synthesising the new chemical substance - a key ingredient in antimalaria drugs - to be able to stop the function of an enzyme known as dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR).

It is an essential enzyme in plasmodium falciparum - the malaria strain most resistant to the antimalaria drug and mostly found in Asia and Africa.

Her work will carry on from research conducted by a prominent Thai scientist, Yongyuth Yuthawong, and his research team. They had discovered the mechanism and evolution of drugresistant pathogens named plasmodium falciparum and plasmodium vivax.

They found that the drug resistance of the plasmodium pathogen was caused by the mutation of the gene that controls the production of the DHFR enzyme and reduced the connection between the enzyme and the drug molecule, which was why the efficacy of antimalaria drugs has weakened.

 Yongyuth, a former science and technology minister, expects that the novel chemical substance could be effective whether pathogens will resist the drug or not, as the new chemical substance's structure could catch and limit the function of both antimalaria drug resistant pathogens and non antimalaria drug resistant pathogens.

About 500 million people around the world are infected with malaria and 2 million of them die each year. In Thailand about 30,000 people fall ill with malaria each year.

According to the World Health Organisation, antimalarial drug resistance is a major public health problem that hinders the control of the disease.

The problem is aggravated by the existence of crossresistance among drugs belonging to the same chemical family.

But Yongyuth believes that this new substance would be the novel mechanism to limit the evolution of drug resistant pathogens.