Project Summary

Primaquine is an essential drug in malaria treatment used both for the treatment of Plasmodium vivax malaria and for transmission blocking in Plasmodium falciparum malaria. It especially important in the treatment of vivax malaria as it kills the dormant malaria parasites, which prevents malaria relapses.

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However, today primaquine is not recommended by the World Health Organization to be administered to breastfeeding women, due to concerns for the safety of the breastfeeding infant. This policy could result in radical cure for vivax malaria being withheld from women for years in case of repeated frequent pregnancies. This project aims to use population pharmacokinetic approach to evaluate the theoretical doses an infant would receive after primaquine treatment. This kind of analysis are powerful and will give us a model describing the concentrations of primaquine both on a population level and on an individual level. This would give us the possibility to simulate the dose received in infants based on the dose given to the mother and, if necessary, dose adjustments could be suggested. Not much research has been done investigating the distribution of primaquine into breastmilk, one article using the same data as this project has been published but more information is needed