Current Challenges and Obstacles to Drug Development for Chagas Disease
Journal Title: Drug Designing & Intellectual Properties International Journal - Year 2018, Vol 2, Issue 2
Abstract
Chagas disease is a protozoan infection which was first identified more than one hundred years ago. But even now, drugs to treat the latent and chronic phases of the disease are not available. The success of a drug design is highly dependent on activity and toxicity. In the case of Chagas disease, questions remain as to identifying the best treatment (mainly for the chronic phase), and how new drugs and drug combinations compare to current therapy. The principal priority of this mini-review is to report the enormous difficulty that pharmaceutical chemists encounter in the development of new drugs for neglected tropical infectious diseases, in this case Chagas disease. Chagas disease is one of the 17 neglected diseases and was identified 109 years ago by the Brazilian physician and researcher Carlos Justiniano Ribeiro Chagas. Also known as American trypanosomiasis, Chagas disease is endemic in 21 Latin American countries [1-5]. Due to an increasingly globalized world, this parasite has spread to the United States, Japan, Australia, Canada, and even across the European continent [6,7]. It is caused by the hemoflagellate protozoan from the Kinetoplastida order of the Trypanosamatidae family, called Trypanosoma cruzi [2,8,9]. Treatment is restricted to two nitroheterocyclic drugs: nifurtimox (1) and benznidazole (2) (Figure 1). These were discovered during the 1960s and 1970s, respectively [10,11]. Both drugs are more effective in the acute phase of the disease than in the indeterminate and chronic phases [12-21]. Furthermore, there are differences in the efficacies of these drugs in relation to the several strains of T. cruzi [22] (Figure 1).
Authors and Affiliations
Cauê Benito Scarim, Chung Man Chin
Keywords
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- EP ID EP587739
- DOI 10.32474/DDIPIJ.2018.02.000134
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