By: Dr. Ripudaman Singh, Asstt. Editor-ICN & Hemant Kumar, Special Correspondent-ICN
NEW DELHI: A robot scientist has helped researchers identify a chemical compound found in toothpaste that could help in the fight against malaria.
The research team, with help from Eve, an artificially-intelligent robot, has found triclosan – an antibacterial agent which stops plaque from building up on the teeth- could be used as an anti-malarial drug.
Eve was developed by scientist at the Universities of Manchester, Aberystwyth, and Cambridge to speed up the drug discovery process. It is capable of screening over 10,000 compound per day.
The team believes that triclosen could be employed as a drug against strains of malaria parasite that have grown resistant to a currently-used drug called pyrimethamine.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), nearly half of the world’s population is at risk of malaria. In 2015, there were roughly 212 million malaria cases and an estimated 4,29,000 malaria deaths.
A number of medicines are used to treat the disease but the parasites are becoming more resistant, raising the spectre of untreatable malaria.
Professor Steve Oliver, from University of Cambridge, said, “Drug-resistant malaria is becoming an increasingly significant threat in Africa and South-East Asia and our medicine chest of effective treatments is slowly depleting.
