Advance in treating ‘neglected’ disease

A NEWLY-identified method of activating drugs to combat one of the world’s most destructive “neglected” diseases could lead to better medicines, according to new research led by the University of Dundee.

Visceral leishmaniasis (VL) is a disease which blights the developing world with 200,000 to 400,000 new cases and an estimated 40,000 deaths annually, making it the second biggest parasitic killer after malaria.

The vast majority of cases are seen in seven countries — India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Brazil, Ethiopia, South Sudan and Sudan.

There are no vaccines available and drug treatments all have serious limitations.

Professor Alan Fairlamb, Dr Kevin Read and colleagues at Dundee University discovered delamanid — an oral nitrodrug used for the treatment of tuberculosis — showed promise for the treatment of VL with potential to provide a muchneeded alternative to the current unsatisfactory anti-leishmanial drugs.

Now the researchers in the school of life sciences, working with colleagues at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, have discovered a new protein which may hold the key to developing better, more effective nitro-drugs to tackle the disease.

Principal research fellow Professor Fairlamb said: “There has been considerable interest in developing new compounds to target diseases like leishmaniasis, particularly because the existing drugs are very unsatisfactory and increasingly becoming unusable due to resistance in the parasite.”

He said the discovery of the new protein would “suggest drug combinations that will reduce the risk of emergence of drug resistance”.

Colin Douglas during healthier times.