According to reports, a tentative drug from Novartis has been found effective in fighting malaria infection in mice. Now scientists are hopeful that the drug will be useful for the treatment of the disease in human beings too.

While testing NITD609 on mice that had malaria, it was seen that one oral dose of the drug was enough to get rid of the disease and the drug seemed to work in a special manner from other anti-malarial drugs, which are available in the market.

An intercontinental group of scientists said that the drug is found to be effectual in battling against the two widespread parasites- Plasmodium falciparum and P. vivax, which cause malaria.

The drug was also found effective in fighting a variety of drug-resistant strains. The study appeared in the journal Science on Thursday.

Rick Davis, of Britain's Wellcome Trust that advocated the research, said, "A single-dose cure would go a long way to addressing the unmet medical need in malaria, and we look forward to seeing how this compound performs in clinical trials".

WHO says that every year in Africa, there are roughly 243 million instances of malaria that result in about 863,000 deaths, and most often young children are the ones who succumb to death because of this killer disease.