# Process specific cellular screening for antimalarial drug discovery

> **NIH NIH R21** · UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS SAN ANTONIO · 2020 · $224,500

## Abstract

Abstract
Malaria continues to kill upwards of 400,000 people annually, and the
development and spread of resistance to frontline drugs will put more lives at
risk. For the malaria eradication campaign to succeed, we need next generation
antimalarial drugs that do more than just treat disease. A versatile antimalarial
would be capable of killing the clinically silent liver stage that initiates human
infection, as well as the gametocytes which are responsible for transmitting
infection back to mosquitos, in addition to killing the asexual blood stages that
cause malaria. Phenotypic drug discovery has yielded new candidates meeting
this highly desirable profile, and target identification and phenotypic profiiing have
revealed that most of these abrogate the core parasite processes of protein
production and transport. Development of process-specific screens to identify
and differentiate those compounds able inhibit parasite protein synthesis and
transport in their native cellular context, would accelerate the discovery of new
high value antimalarials. This screening approach, while agnostic to molecular
target, will allow use of a well-characterized model parasite to rapidly identify
those compounds with the highest potential for being multistage inhibitors in a
single primary screen.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9876734
- **Project number:** 1R21AI149275-01
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS SAN ANTONIO
- **Principal Investigator:** Kirsten Kay Hanson
- **Activity code:** R21 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $224,500
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2020-01-01 → 2021-12-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9876734

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9876734, Process specific cellular screening for antimalarial drug discovery (1R21AI149275-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9876734. Licensed CC0.

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