A team of researchers at Australia's Monash University has made a major breakthrough in the international fight against malaria, which claims the life of a child across the world every 30 seconds, according to a report published Tuesday in the U.S. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The team, based at the Monash University ARC Center of Excellence in Structural and Functional Microbial Genomics, has been able to deactivate the final stage of the malaria parasite's digestive machinery, effectively starving the parasite of nutrients and disabling its survival mechanism.

This process of starvation leads to the death of the parasite, which is contracted by half a billion people and causes around 1 million deaths a year.

Leading Professor James Whisstock said the results had laid the scientific groundwork to further develop a specific class of drugs to treat the disease.

"About 40 percent of the world's population are at risk of contracting malaria. It is only early days but this discovery could one day provide treatment for some of those 2.5 billion people across the globe," Whisstock said.

"Drug-resistant malaria is an ever increasing problem, meaning that there is an urgent requirement to develop new therapeutic strategies," Whisstock said.

This breakthrough is in addition to existing malaria drug discovery research advances at Monash University. A new drug candidate which aims to provide a single dose cure, discovered by a major international project involving the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, is currently progressing to first human studies with support from the Medicines for Malaria Venture, Geneva, Switzerland.

(Xinhua News Agency February 4, 2009)