Advances in Development of New Treatment for Leishmaniasis

Abstract

Leishmaniasis is a neglected infectious disease caused by several different species of protozoan parasites of the genus Leishmania. Current strategies to control this disease are mainly based on chemotherapy. Despite being available for the last 70 years, leishmanial chemotherapy has lack of efficiency, since its route of administration is difficult and it can cause serious side effects, which results in the emergence of resistant cases. The medical-scientific community is facing difficulties to overcome these problems with new suitable and efficient drugs, as well as the identification of new drug targets. The availability of the complete genome sequence of Leishmania has given the scientific community the possibility of large-scale analysis, which may lead to better understanding of parasite biology and consequent identification of novel drug targets. In this review we focus on how high-throughput analysis is helping us and other groups to identify novel targets for chemotherapeutic interventions. We further discuss recent data produced by our group regarding the use of the high-throughput techniques and how this helped us to identify and assess the potential of new identified targets.