Last Updated: 21/11/2023
Evaluation of the leishmanicidal potential of antimalarial drugs and study of their effects on cell death in Leishmania spp.
Objectives
*Original title in Portuguese: Avaliação do potencial leishmanicida de fármacos antimaláricos e estudo dos seus efeitos na morte celular em Leishmania spp.
This study aims to verify which death process/es are involved when Leishmania is treated by some of the antimalarials, as well as to evaluate the leishmanicidal effect of artesunate in vitro and in vivo.
Although neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) have received attention in recent years, the availability of alternative medicines is still limited; between 2000 to 2014 of the 4006 phase I studies, only 66 (1.65%) new products were intended to prevent or treat NTDs. An alternative to this limitation is the repositioning of drugs used against other protozoa, such as Plasmodium ssp.; this strategy may accelerate research into the treatment and prevention of leishmaniasis. The sets of results obtained by our team plus the mechanisms described in the literature indicate that antimalarials have promising leishmanicidal activity and still require further studies to understand their mechanism of action.
Dec 2019
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