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Indian scientists find safe drug against kala azar
Monday September 10, 2012 07:30:33 PM,
IANS
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Kolkata: Indian
scientists have found a safe orally-administered drug against kala
azar, a disease that puts at risk an estimated 165.4 million
people in Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh.
Termed by WHO as a "neglected disease", kala azar or visceral leishmaniasis, the second-largest parasitic killer in the world
after malaria, has proved resistant to most medicines.
Provisional figures released by the union health and family
welfare ministry, show that kala azar claimed 20 lives and
afflicted 14,227 people till July.
Not only was there no safe drug to treat the infection until now,
there were even reports of resistance to courses of treatment in
existence. Treatment of the disease was thus becoming more
expensive, said Nahid Ali of the Infectious Diseases and
Immunology Division at the Indian Institute of Chemical Biology (IICB)
here.
The IICB functions under the Council of Scientific and Industrial
Research (CSIR).
The only oral drug for this disease, miltefosine, causes toxicity
that affects the gastrointestinal and reproductive organs.
Other drugs come with adverse side-effects, poor efficacy, limited
accessibility and high cost.
"To overcome such shortcomings we tested eleven compounds, all
derivatives of a lead containing substance. Out of the entire
series, two lead compounds displayed the most pronounced
activity," Ali told IANS.
The research, conducted on mice and published in the journal
"Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy", shows that the compounds
used could trigger a genetically commanded self-destruction
process called "apoptosis" or cell suicide.
The lead compounds are safe, in that they did not show any
negative effects on the liver or kidney and caused no mutation,
Ali added.
Leishmaniasis manifests mainly in three clinical forms: visceral
leishmaniasis (VL), cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL), and
mucocutaneous leishmaniasis (MCL).
The leishmania parasite invades a particular type of white blood
cell that ingests foreign bodies (called a macrophage) and
establishes infection.
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