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IN THE wake of on Monday comes news that certain anti-cancer drugs might also work against the malarial parasite.

There were . With resistance to existing anti-malarial drugs growing all the time, new weapons against the disease are a priority.

Now of the Lausanne Federal Polytechnic in Switzerland and colleagues have discovered that Plasmodium falciparum, the parasite that causes malaria, co-opts two red blood cell proteins called kinases. Many new cancer treatments also target kinases, and when the team exposed malaria-infected red blood cells and liver cells to some of these “kinase inhibitors”, they killed the bug but not the cells (Cellular Microbiology, ).

“Our discovery opens up new ways to potentially combat malaria,” says Doerig, although he cautions that the work is very preliminary. However, the team is in discussions with pharmaceutical companies to test more kinase inhibitors, especially those that have proved safe in clinical trials but didn’t make the grade as cancer drugs.