A breakthrough in understanding how a single-cell parasite makes ergosterol (its version of cholesterol) could lead to more effective drugs for human leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease that afflicts about 1 million people and kills about 30,000 people around the world every year.
The findings, reported in Nature Communications, also solve a decades-long scientific puzzle that’s prevented drugmakers from successfully using azole antifungal drugs to treat visceral leishmaniasis, or VL.
About 30 years ago, scientists discovered the two species of single-cell parasites that cause VL, Leishmania donovani and Leishmania infantum, made the same lipid sterol, called ergosterol, as fungi proven susceptible to azoles antifungals. These azoles antifungals target a crucial enzyme for sterol biosynthesis, called CYP51.
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