Alumni & Friends
LAS Alumni Information
Alumni Network
Chemical Sciences
Osteoporosis Drugs Found to Combat Malaria, Other Diseases
An estimated 3 billion people suffer from parasitic diseases such as malaria, sleeping sickness, and AIDS-related infections. The most common treatments for these diseases often cause adverse side effects, requiring cessation of treatment.
Now researchers at Illinois, as members of a multinational research team, have discovered that a class of bisphosphonate drugs already approved to treat osteoporosis and other bone disorders in humans carries potent antiparasitic activity.
"It's a very welcome development to find a class of compounds that have strong anti-parasitic activity and are already approved for use in humans," says Eric Oldfield, professor of chemistry and biophysics in LAS who, along with veterinary pathobiology professors Roberto Docampo and Silvia Moreno, led a team of eight UI researchers. "New drugs are urgently required in the less-developed nations, since the parasites are becoming drug-resistant at an alarming rate. And many of the current drugs are either too expensive or too toxic to be used routinely."
The bisphosphonate drugs are active against the causative agents of African sleeping sickness, Chagas' disease, malaria, leishmaniasis, and toxoplasmosis, the scientists found. The drugs act much as they do in inhibiting bone resorption, by targeting and inhibiting a specific enzyme, farnesylpyrophosphate synthase, in the parasites.
Researchers from the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research in Caracas and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine also participated in the study.
Summer 2001