Introduction: Currently, widely used antimalarial drugs have a limited clinical lifespan due to parasite resistance development. With resistance continuously rising, antimalarial drug discovery requires strategies to decrease the time of delivering a new antimalarial drug while simultaneously increasing the drug's therapeutic lifespan. Lessons learnt from various chemotherapeutic resistance studies in the fields of antibiotic and cancer research offer potentially useful strategies that can be applied to antimalarial drug discovery.
Areas covered: In this review the authors discuss current strategies to circumvent resistance in malaria and alternatives that could be employed.
Expert opinion: Scientists have been 'beating back' the malaria parasite with novel drugs for the past 49 years but the constant rise in antimalarial drug resistance is forcing the drug discovery community to explore alternative strategies. Avant-garde anti-resistance strategies from alternative fields may assist our endeavors to manage, control and prevent antimalarial drug resistance to progress beyond beating the resistant parasite back, to stopping it dead in its tracks.
Keywords: Antimalarial drugs; chemogenomics; combination therapies; drug resistance; molecular decoys; multitargeting; pleiotropic drugs; polypharmacology; synthetic lethality inference.