Trumpeted last week as the new preferred drug to treat malaria, artesunate is shown to reduce the likelihood of death in adults by 39 percent, 24 percent in children. So what’s the problem? It’s already becoming ineffective, says Saint Louis University’s Pete Ruminski.
“It’s very much like antibiotics, they develop resistance. Pharmaceutical companies stopped working on antibiotics a long time ago because they thought, ‘Well geez, we’ve got a whole bunch of them and we’ve got that problem solved.’ Now, they’re scrambling to come up with new mechanisms.”
As executive director of the newly launched Center for World Health & Medicine, Ruminski and his team of former Pfizer scientists aren’t going to wait for current malaria treatments to become completely useless. And they’re not going it alone, either. SLU announced last month that the Center was partnering with the Guangzhou Institute of Biomedicine and Health, a Chinese research facility, to develop malaria treatments.
The Center isn’t your typical university outreach program to the developing world. They’re more focused on developing drugs, which most university-affiliated organizations don’t do. But with Pfizer’s loss, came SLU’s gain. Ruminski, himself a former Pfizer employee, saw an opportunity to use those scientists’ highly-developed skills and experience in drug development for more altruistic means.
“Most research on these diseases has been done in an academic environment. Academic scientists are very good at finding causes of diseases and discovering biological targets, but they don’t have that specialized training in how to translate that basic knowledge into a drug—that’s the key,” he says. “We’re kind of that bridge, that translational bridge… and what we’re doing here, looking at these types of diseases with two fully functional pharmaceutical teams [the Center and GIBH], is, I don’t want to say unique, but it’s kind of cutting edge.”
The international partnership between the Center and GIBH arose out of serendipitous networking from the team’s old Pfizer days. They knew that Micky Tortorella (another alumnus of the pharmaceutical giant) was an expert on a type of enzyme they were looking at for their malaria project, and they knew he was recruited by GIBH to be its vice president of research. From there, it was just figuring out a way to collaborate, says Dave Griggs, who initially reached out to Tortorella and is the director of the Center’s cell and molecular biology division.
That was last spring, before the Center officially opened in July. By November, the two organizations had started formulating the details of the partnership. Coordinating research efforts and delegating tasks between two separate organizations is challenging; doing so between two vastly different countries is complicated, to say the least. The Center and GIBH rely on Skype for their weekly meetings and alternate between 6:30 a.m. or 8:30 p.m. as meeting times. And surprisingly, the language barrier isn’t so much of a impediment because of how fluent the Chinese scientists are in English. (A meeting summary is still emailed to ensure everyone left with the same conclusion, says project leader and chemist Marv Meyers).
China isn’t the first place that comes to mind when thinking of malaria. That unwelcome honor goes to sub-Saharan Africa which had about 191 million reported cases in 2009, accounting for 85 percent of the total number worldwide. China comparatively had about 17,000, according to latest information provided by the World Health Organization.
Yet, it was China and GIBH that were seeking a Western partner to work on malaria treatments, Ruminski says. “In the past, at least in the pharmaceutical/biomedical arenas, Western countries have been at the cutting edge of new drug innovation. More recently, developing countries like China and India have expanded efforts into the manufacture of drugs or the active ingredients that go into drugs. But now I think what they really want to do is to accelerate innovation within their own countries for diseases that affect their population.”
China spent the past 20 years channeling most of its society’s resources in to the economy, creating unparalleled economic growth and raising concerns that China was challenging the U.S.’ role as world leader. However China’s growth came at a hefty cost with massive damage to the environment as well as poor living standards. At the most recent National People’s Congress, the country’s only legislative house, the government decided to slow growth down to seven and a half percent. Dr. Joel Glassman, a specialist of Chinese politics at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, says that decision was made to invest more in what the government calls “quality of life.”
“I think China is very eager to continue a process of technology or a knowledge transfer from the West to China. China recognizes the value of the accumulated knowledge of or know how that the West has already developed,” he says. “I think they’re very smart about it and they’re very eager whenever possible to have international partnerships that will lead to a transfer of technology.”
With China, and more specifically the Midwest-China cargo hub, being the buzzword among St. Louis business leaders, the impact that the Center’s partnership with GIBH would have on those negotiations is up in the air. But Ruminski believes that it can lead to expanded opportunities between St. Louis and China, which could boost the likelihood of cargo hub materializing. “It’s good for the St. Louis area as well as for Saint Louis University because if this turns into a broader partnership, that opens up the opportunity for engaging more students to come to our universities, and for visiting scientist exchanges (which we’ve already talked about trying to set up),” he says.
Having only started to actively work on the malaria project in the past two months, the Center for World Health & Medicine and GIBH are in the early stages of drug development. Collaborating with Washington University’s malaria expert Dan Goldberg, they’re looking into a protein that is essential for the malaria parasite to reproduce and thrive. They think if they can block that particular protein, then they should be able to shut down the parasite’s ability to reproduce. But it could still be a few years before the Center can send the drug to malaria-endemic countries.
“We have to be forward looking and embrace the global nature of things today, and I think that you want to look for all kinds of opportunities to collaborate,” Ruminski says. “That’s what makes our country vibrant and innovative and this is just another way to do that.”
