Can a medicine cause a war? When chemists isolated a new compound from the bark of a South American tree, they had no idea they were changing world history, and cocktails, forever.
If we look at how the bark of the cinchona tree is used to treat malaria, we can see cutting edge chemistry showing quinine binding to an enzyme that is essential for the malaria parasite’s survival. But if we look from another angle, we can see how that coincidental affinity may have been a major contributing factor to World War One.
#malaria #medicinalchemistry #history
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Sources and more information:
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The cellular thermal shift assay for evaluating drug target interactions in cells
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Population genetic analysis of the DARC locus (Duffy) reveals adaptation from standing variation associated with malaria resistance in humans
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5365118/
Susceptibility to Plasmodium vivax malaria associated with DARC (Duffy antigen) polymorphisms is influenced by the time of exposure to malaria
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-32254-z
Plasmodium falciparum purine nucleoside phosphorylase is critical for viability of malaria parasites
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18957439/
Types of Malaria Parasites
https://stanfordhealthcare.org/medical-conditions/primary-care/malaria/types.html
Historical Review: Problematic Malaria Prophylaxis with Quinine
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4973170/
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Mortality among European settlers in pre-colonial West Africa: The “White Man’s Grave” revisited
https://gupea.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/49666
Malaria’s Impact Worldwide
https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/malaria_worldwide/impact.html
Portrait of a serial killer
https://www.nature.com/articles/news021001-6
Antimalarial Drug Discovery: From Quinine to the Dream of Eradication
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ml4004414
Efficacy of a low-dose candidate malaria vaccine, R21 in adjuvant Matrix-M, with seasonal administration to children in Burkina Faso: a randomised controlled trial
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673621009430
Quinine's Target
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/quinine-s-target
Quinine fever
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41557-021-00872-2
Hemoglobin degradation in malaria-infected erythrocytes determined from live cell magnetophoresis
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Dramatic evolution within human genome may have been caused by malaria parasite
https://www.science.org/content/article/dramatic-evolution-within-human-genome-may-have-been-caused-malaria-...