Toy kit against malaria: Magic bullets, LEGO, Trojan horses and Russian dolls

摘要

It was Paul Ehrlich who popularized the magic bullet concept [1], according to which therapeutic agents would be directed specifically to destroy their diseased targets with no harm to the surrounding organs. The objective of delivering drugs exclusively to a selected site with minimal exposure for sensitive adjacent healthy cells or tissues is the holy grail of the fast-developing nanomedi-cine field [2,3]. Encapsulation of drugs in targeted nanovectors is a rapidly growing area with a clear applicability to infectious disease treatment [4], and pharmaceutical nanotech-nology has been identified as a potentially essential tool in the future fight against malaria [5]. New antimalarial compounds are being developed [6], many of them with a narrow therapeutic concentration range outside the toxic regime where the drug is effective.