Antimalarial drugs are vital for treating malaria and controlling transmission. Measuring drug efficacy in the field requires large clinical trials and thus we have identified proxy measures of drug efficacy such as the parasite clearance curve. This is often assumed to measure the rate of drug activity against parasites and is used to predict optimal treatment regimens required to completely clear a blood-stage infection. We discuss evidence that the clearance curve is not measuring the rate of drug killing. This has major implications for how we assess optimal treatment regimens, as well as how we prioritise new drugs in the drug development pipeline.

抗疟药对于治疗疟疾和控制传播至关重要。在该领域中测量药物功效需要进行大量的临床试验，因此，我们已经确定了药物功效的替代指标，例如寄生虫清除率曲线。通常认为这可以衡量针对寄生虫的药物活性速率，并用于预测完全清除血液阶段感染所需的最佳治疗方案。我们讨论了清除率曲线不能衡量药物杀灭率的证据。这对于我们如何评估最佳治疗方案以及我们如何在药物开发流程中确定新药物的优先级具有重大意义。