An international team has been able to deactivate the final stage of the malaria parasite's digestive machinery, effectively starving the parasite of nutrients and disabling its survival mechanism. And, this process of starvation leads to the death of the parasite.

According to the researchers, the results had laid the scientific groundwork to further develop a "specific class" of drugs to treat the disease that's contracted by half-a-billion people and causes around one million deaths a year worldwide.

Lead author Sheena McGowan said: "We had an idea as to how malaria could be starved and we've shown this, chemically, can be done. A single bite from an infected mosquito transfers the malaria parasite into a human's blood stream.

"The malaria parasite must then break down blood proteins in order to obtain nutrients. Malaria carries out the first stages of digestion inside a specialised compartment called the digestive vacuole – this can be considered to be like a stomach.

"However, the enzyme we have studied (known as PfA-M1), which is essential for parasite viability, is located outside the digestive vacuole meaning it is easier to target from a drug perspective."

Added researcher Professor James Whisstock of Monash University: "About forty per cent of the world's population are at risk of contracting malaria. It is only early days but this discovery could one day provide treatment for some of those 2.5 billion people across the globe."