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Drug discovery

Schistosome treatment

Nature volume 452, page 296 (2008)Cite this article

The statistics are grim. Schistosomiasis — a tropical disease caused by flatworms of the genus Schistosoma — kills 280,000 people annually. Moreover, 200 million people are infected with the worm, and a further 800 million or so are at risk. An effective, low-cost drug called praziquantel is available. But it is heavily and regularly prescribed and, as there is currently no vaccine or alternative drug available, the danger of schistosome parasites evolving resistance to the drug is looming. So the discovery by Ahmed Sayed and colleagues, at Illinois State University in Normal and the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, of a drug that may be as effective as praziquantel, if not more so, is good news (A. A. Sayed et al. Nature Med. doi:10.1038/nm1737; 2008).

Within their human host, schistosome parasites reside in aerobic environments — skin, blood, lungs and liver. This means they must be able to avoid damage caused by reactive oxygen species. The authors therefore took advantage of a valuable resource — the NIH Chemical Genomics Center chemical repository — to screen thousands of compounds for their ability to target the antioxidant pathway in one of the most widespread of schistosome species, Schistosoma mansoni (pictured).

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Authors
  1. Sadaf Shadan
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Shadan, S. Schistosome treatment. Nature 452, 296 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/452296b

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