New Chemical Compounds Could Lead to Sleeping Sickness Cure

A new research has helped scientists identify hundreds of chemical compounds that could provide cure for sleeping sickness.

Michael Pollastri, who runs Northeastern's Laboratory for Neglected Disease Drug Discovery, and co-collaborators at the Spanish National Research Council for Scientific Research worked with global healthcare company GlaxoSmithKline to screen and test more than 42,000 chemical compounds against the parasites that cause sleeping sickness.

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Devastating diseases in humans and livestock are caused by tsetse flies when they transmit Trypanosome parasites.

In the paper, researchers reported that they identified nearly 800 compounds that represent good options for early drug discovery.

Sleeping sickness is one of the World Health Organization's 17 neglected tropical diseases. It has been found only in sub Sahara Africa and infects between 10,000 and 30,000 people annually.

The next step would involve continued testing on these promising 800 compounds and determining which ones could be tweaked in order to have the right potency, properties, and lack of toxicity to treat the disease. At that point, they might be able to advance a compound toward clinical trials for sleeping sickness.

Mating Among Microbes That Cause African Sleeping Sickness Reported for First Time
Mating among microbes responsible for African sleeping sickness has been observed for the first time by researchers from the University of Bristol.

The study is published in the journal PLOS.

Source-ANI

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