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Resistance of malaria parasites to drugs — now including artemisinin and its derivatives —threatens global malaria control. Existing methods to detect parasites with a relatively slow clearance rate (a marker for resistance) are labor intensive, slow, and costly. Investigators have developed novel in-vitro and ex-vivo ring-stage survival assays (RSAs) that detect artemisinin-resistant Plasmodium falciparum, and they now report on its performance.
The researchers exposed early ring-stage parasites from patients with slow and fast parasite clearance to relatively high levels of artemisinin in vitro and measured their survival 72 hours later. When the RSA was performed on 0- to 3-hour ring-stage parasites, the median survival was 47 times great…