Hemozoin and antimalarial drug discovery

Recent initiatives to develop more effective and affordable drugs, controlling mosquitoes and development of a preventative vaccine have been launched with the goal of completely eradicating malaria. To this end, Novartis (Surrey, UK) and GlaxoSmithKline (Middlesex, UK) screened their chemical libraries of approximately two million small molecules for antimalarial properties, which resulted in a set of over 20,000 'highly druggable' initial hits. Efforts in academia are centered on specific pathway targets. One such high-throughput screening effort has been focused on hemozoin formation, a unique heme detoxification pathway found in the malaria parasite. This review discusses the current approaches and limitations of high-throughput screening discovery of hemozoin inhibitors. In the future, new methods must be developed to validate the mechanism of action of these hit compounds within the parasite.