Is the Tide Turning for New Malaria Medicines?

A return to traditional screening methods has rapidly produced a candidate malaria drug. Every so often, the tide turns in a field of science. In malaria research, for a while an approach called “rational design” held sway, with great optimism that new drugs would emerge from understanding the biology of the malaria parasite at the molecular level. On page 1175 of this issue, however, Rottmann et al. ( 1 ) take our thinking back up to the level of the parasite.