TCS develops gene-based malaria cure
Rediff.com — August 8, 2006

Tata Consultancy Services, India's leading software services firm, is all set to make a mark in the healthcare space by developing a novel gene-based therapy for the treatment of Asia's most dreaded disease - malaria.

The Tata group company, which ventured into the healthcare-related software services, has successfully developed a novel gene-based technology that will revolutionise treatment for Malaria, the most dreaded disease in Asia and Africa.

The scientific team at the Advanced Technology Centre of TCS Health in Hyderabad has undertaken this initiative as part of the New Millennium Indian Technology Leadership Initiative of the Council of Indian Scientific and Industrial Research.

The new research involves an improved annotation of the genomic structure of P Falciparum - a parasite that is the principal cause of Malaria.

According to M Vidyasagar, executive vice-president and head of the Advance Technology Centre, the TCS approach in this first gene-based technology for Malaria treatment involves identification of genes and their possible functions based on combination of machine learning algorithms to predict the locations of genes and experimental verification of the predictions.

However, the verification part will be undertaken by TCS' academic partners in this project. The technology is expected to be ready for further development to the therapeutical usage soon.

Following this, TCS, in consensus with the CSIR would transfer the technology to prospective partners like a pharmaceutical or bio-pharmaceutical company. Malaria, a dreaded disease in many Asian countries and Africa, is treated with high-dose antibiotics and Chloroquines.

Though Chloroquine was successful in combating the disease when launched in the 1950s, the malaria parasite gradually became resistant. Now, new studies have found that combining the drug with another preparation, Primaquine, could restore its effect. However, world health surveys report that new malaria drugs are needed badly today.

Since all the drugs currently available for the treatment are for post infection therapy, the genome-based technology would also be helpful in several initiatives currently going on in the world for developing malaria vaccines.

There are at least 300 million acute cases of malaria each year globally, resulting in more than a million deaths. Around 90 per cent of these deaths occur in Africa. In fact, Malaria is Africa's leading cause of under-five mortality.