Drug repurposing and human parasitic protozoan diseases

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Author(s)
Andrews, Katherine T
Fisher, Gillian
Skinner-Adams, Tina S
Year published
2014
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Parasitic diseases have an enormous health, social and economic impact and are a particular problem in tropical regions of the world. Diseases caused by protozoa and helminths, such as malaria and schistosomiasis, are the cause of most parasite related morbidity and mortality, with an estimated 1.1 million combined deaths annually. The global burden of these diseases is exacerbated by the lack of licensed vaccines, making safe and effective drugs vital to their prevention and treatment. Unfortunately, where drugs are available, their usefulness is being increasingly threatened by parasite drug resistance. The need for new ...
View more >Parasitic diseases have an enormous health, social and economic impact and are a particular problem in tropical regions of the world. Diseases caused by protozoa and helminths, such as malaria and schistosomiasis, are the cause of most parasite related morbidity and mortality, with an estimated 1.1 million combined deaths annually. The global burden of these diseases is exacerbated by the lack of licensed vaccines, making safe and effective drugs vital to their prevention and treatment. Unfortunately, where drugs are available, their usefulness is being increasingly threatened by parasite drug resistance. The need for new drugs drives antiparasitic drug discovery research globally and requires a range of innovative strategies to ensure a sustainable pipeline of lead compounds. In this review we discuss one of these approaches, drug repurposing or repositioning, with a focus on major human parasitic protozoan diseases such as malaria, trypanosomiasis, toxoplasmosis, cryptosporidiosis and leishmaniasis.
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View more >Parasitic diseases have an enormous health, social and economic impact and are a particular problem in tropical regions of the world. Diseases caused by protozoa and helminths, such as malaria and schistosomiasis, are the cause of most parasite related morbidity and mortality, with an estimated 1.1 million combined deaths annually. The global burden of these diseases is exacerbated by the lack of licensed vaccines, making safe and effective drugs vital to their prevention and treatment. Unfortunately, where drugs are available, their usefulness is being increasingly threatened by parasite drug resistance. The need for new drugs drives antiparasitic drug discovery research globally and requires a range of innovative strategies to ensure a sustainable pipeline of lead compounds. In this review we discuss one of these approaches, drug repurposing or repositioning, with a focus on major human parasitic protozoan diseases such as malaria, trypanosomiasis, toxoplasmosis, cryptosporidiosis and leishmaniasis.
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Journal Title
International Journal for Parasitology: Drugs and Drug Resistance
Volume
4
Issue
2
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2014. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/) which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, providing that the work is properly cited. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.
Subject
Medical microbiology
Medical parasitology
Microbiology