Abstract
THE appearance of strains of human falciparum malaria resistant to chloroquine1 has stimulated investigations on the mode of action of this drug and on the mechanism of resistance to it. Although no morphological differences have been described between chloroquine-resistant and ordinary Plasmodium falciparum, a striking difference was observed in the mouse malaria P. berghei; in the resistant strain, pigment (haemozoin) was not visible by light microscopy, and even with the electron microscope only a few minute grains of pigment-like material could be detected2. This finding and the hypothesis advanced independently by Schueler and Cantrell3 and Cohen et al.4, that the binding of chloroquine by ferrihaemic acid might account for chloroquine resistance, direct attention to haemoglobin digestion and its waste product haemozoin as being possibly of significance in both the mode of action of chloroquine and in resistance to it.
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SHERMAN, I., MUDD, J. & TRAGER, W. Chloroquine Resistance and the Nature of Malarial Pigment. Nature 208, 691–693 (1965). https://doi.org/10.1038/208691a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/208691a0
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