Potential leishmaniasis treatments studied

PITTSBURGH, Nov. 4 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists say they've created a new approach that has identified compounds with a potential for treating leishmaniasis -- a parasitic infection.

Medical scientists at the University of Pittsburgh and the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research screened nearly 200,000 chemical compounds and then regrouped them into chemotypes or chemical classes, both new and known, said senior investigator Professor John Lazo, director of the university's Drug Discovery Institute.

"We are making real progress in our effort to find new drugs to treat what I'd call the most neglected of the neglected diseases," Lazo said. "And the method we've developed could be applied to find treatments for other parasitic infections, which are an enormous global health burden."

Assistant Professor Elizabeth Sharlow, who led the research, said investigators used unconventional approaches to find drug candidates. First, they developed an assay based on the promastigote, the Leishmania life cycle stage that infects the sandfly, to measure the candidate's ability to inhibit the parasite's growth.

"Another unusual step we took was to screen compounds at relatively high concentration, which would make them more likely to affect promastigote growth," Sharlow said. "The aim was to maximize the diversity of the active compounds, which we then clustered into similar chemotypes with powerful computational methods to make further testing more manageable."

The study appears in the early online edition of PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases.