Natural Product Treatments for Leishmaniasis

描述（由申请人提供）：利什曼病在发展中国家造成惊人的死亡率和发病率。利什曼原虫属寄生虫感染在人类中引起一系列疾病，从自愈性皮肤损伤到危及生命的内脏感染。每年发生200万例新的利什曼病病例（150万例为皮肤利什曼病，50万例为内脏利什曼病），3.5亿多人面临患利什曼病的风险，这是世界卫生组织热带病研究（世卫组织热带病研究）优先研究清单上的六种疾病之一。利什曼病的发病率可能正在增加，工业化国家对利什曼病的兴趣也在增加， 部分原因是利什曼病和艾滋病毒合并感染的增加以及该疾病在当前军事行动中的重要性。利什曼病最常通过肠胃外施用毒性药物如五价锑剂和利什曼菌素B来治疗，并且耐药性正在成为一个问题。对于皮肤利什曼病的治疗，经常使用各种药物，但没有一种药物对引起皮肤疾病的所有寄生虫都有效。在此，我们建议调查几个生态位来源的未研究或研究不足的生物多样性，在寻找新的天然产物化学型治疗利什曼病。天然产品代表了美国食品和药物管理局在过去25年中批准的13种抗寄生虫药物中的9种，突出了这种药物发现资源在抗利什曼原虫药物发现研究中的重要作用。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Leishmaniasis exacts a staggering toll of mortality and morbidity on the developing world. Infection with parasites of the genus Leishmania causes a spectrum of disease in humans ranging from self-healing cutaneous lesions to life-threatening visceral infections. Two million new cases of leishmaniasis occur annually (1.5 million for cutaneous leishmaniasis and 500,000 for visceral leishmaniasis and over 350 million people are at risk of acquiring leishmaniasis, which is one of six diseases on the World Health Organization Tropical Disease Research (WHO TDR) list for priority research. The incidence of leishmaniasis may be increasing, and there is also growing interest in leishmaniasis in industrialized countries, in part due to the increase of Leishmania-HIV co-infection and the importance of the disease in current military operations. Leishmaniasis is most often treated by parenteral administration of toxic drugs such as pentavalent antimonials and amphotericin B, and drug resistance is becoming a problem. For the treatment of cutaneous leishmaniasis, a variety of drugs are frequently used, but none is effective against all species of the parasite that cause cutaneous disease. Herein we propose to investigate several niche sources of unstudied or understudied biodiversity in the search for new natural product chemotypes for treating leishmaniasis. Natural products represent 9 of 13 anti-parasitic drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in the past 25 years, highlighting the important role of this drug discovery resource for antileishmanial drug discovery research.