Current Pharmaceutical Design - Volume 13, Issue 6, 2007

Parasitic diseases are the foremost worldwide health problem today, particularly in the under developed countries. It is estimated that the global prevalence of some of these diseases already exceeds 60% among the more than three billion people living in parasite endemic areas. Parasitic diseases are not confined to humans but also affect many domestic and wild animals causing an enormous economic blight to already p Read More

Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense and T. b. gambiense are the causative agents of sleeping sickness, a fatal disease that affects 36 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Nevertheless, only a handful of clinically useful drugs are available. These drugs suffer from severe side-effects. The situation is further aggravated by the alarming incidence of treatment failures in several sleeping sickness foci, apparently indicating the occurrenc Read More

Malaria constitutes an enormous drain on the health and economies of many countries and causes more than a million deaths annually. Moreover, resistance to existing antimalarial drugs is a growing problem, rendering the search for new targets urgent. Protozoan parasites of the genus Plasmodium that cause malaria lack the ability to synthesise the purine ring de novo and so are reliant upon salvage of purines, includin Read More

Toxoplasma gondii is an intracellular parasitic protozoan that infects approximately a billion people worldwide. Infection with T. gondii represents a major health problem for immunocompromised individuals, such as AIDS patients, organ transplant recipients, and the unborn children of infected mothers. Currently available drugs usually do not eradicate infection and as many as 50% of the patients do not respond to this therapy. Read More

Tuberculosis remains a serious health problem throughout the world, and new drugs are needed to help control this disease. We have identified several purine nucleoside analogs that exhibit selective activity against Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The lead compound in this series is 2-methyl-adenosine (methyl-Ado), which is active against proliferating and nonproliferating bacteria due to its ability to inhibit protein synthesis. M Read More

Opportunistic infections are known to cause morbidity and mortality in immunocompromised individuals. In addition, serious infections due to several parasites are also known to affect the quality and duration of life in normal individuals. The importance of dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR) in parasitic chemotherapy arises from its function in DNA biosynthesis and cell replication. DHFR catalyzes the reduction of dihydrofolate ( Read More

Intracellular protozoan parasites are a great threat to animal and human health. To successfully disseminate through an organism these parasites must be able to enter and exit host cells efficiently and rapidly. The inhibition of invasion or egress of obligate intracellular parasites is regarded as a goal for drug development since these processes are essential for their survival and likely to require proteins unique to the parasites. Read More

Natural products have served humankind as drug leads for thousands of years. In the last century natural products have not only served as drugs but have inspired the generation of countless synthetic drugs and drug-leads around natural product pharmacophores. There are no disease targets for which natural products have played a more significant role than in the case of malaria and other parasitic diseases. In this re Read More