The Australian research on how the malaria parasite is able to invade human cells could lead to the creation of a new range of anti-malarial drugs.

A weak link has been discovered, by a team from Walter and Eliza Hall Institute. It is a protein which permits the parasite to live and hide from the immune system.

Every year one to three million people are killed by malaria in developing countries. Malaria is spread by mosquito bites and the death is caused from damage to red blood cells and clogging of the capillaries which feed the brain and other organs.

Dan Goldberg, professor of medicine and of molecular microbiology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator said, “The malaria parasite seizes control of and remodels the red blood cell by secreting hundreds of proteins once it's inside. But without this protein, plasmepsin V, those other proteins can't get out of the parasite into the blood cell, and the infectious process stops.”

A protein in humans known as beta secretase is distantly related to its equivalent plasmepsin V. The important differences between the malarial protein and its closest human relative may cause scientists to be able to use drugs to disable plasmepsin V with very little room for adverse side effects on human biology.