Recent progress in the identification and development of anti-malarial agents using virtual screening based approaches

Malaria has continued to be one of the most perplexing diseases for biological science community around the world due to its prevalent devastating nature and quick developing resistance against the frontline drugs. Artimisinin-based combination therapy (ACT) has been so far found to be among the best therapies against Plasmodium pathogens but alarming emergence of resistance in parasites against every known chemotherapy has prompted the scientific community to step up all the efforts towards development of new and affordable anti-malarial drugs. Computer-aided approaches have received enormous attention in recent years in the field of identification and design of novel drugs. In this review, we summarize recently published research concerning the identification and development of anti-malarial compounds using virtual screening approaches. It would be admirable to discern the successful application of in silico studies for anti-malarial drug discovery hitherto and would certainly help in generating new avenues for pursuing integrated studies between the experimentalists and computational chemists in a systematic manner as a time and cost efficient alternative for future antimalarial drug discovery projects.