[New antimalarial drugs].

Resistance of Plasmodia to available antimalarials is becoming very frequent. Discovering new drugs in this field is therefore a health priority. Only two new antimalarials appeared in the last few years: artemether IM (Paluther) for the treatment of severe malaria and a chloroquine-proguanil combination (Savarine) for the malarial chemoprophylaxis. Several other new molecules are under investigation. Only a few of them result from a targeted pharmacological research. On the other hand, the clinical and biological evaluation of new antimalarials is often conducted without respect of the international industrial guidelines and will probably fail to offer all the guarantees of efficacy and safety required for registration in western countries.