Report of the 2nd Chagas Drug Discovery Consortium meeting, held on 3 November 2010; Atlanta GA, USA

Abstract

Chagas disease is an infectious disease with the highest impact in Latin America and a growing worldwide problem. Chagas disease is the result of long-term, persistent infection with the protozoan parasite Trypanosoma cruzi. The current therapies for treating T. cruzi infection and thus preventing Chagas disease often have adverse effects, unpredictable efficacy and require long courses of treatment. Development of new therapies has been very limited, in part due to lack of interest but also as a result of poor support and inappropriate models for discovering and evaluating candidate drugs. The Chagas Drug Discovery Consortium (CDDC) was created with funding from the US National Institutes of Health to help address some of these issues. The goals of the CDDC are to discover and evaluate new candidate drugs and develop rigorous assays of drug efficacy. This report summarizes the second meeting of the CDDC in November 2010.

Keywords:

• Chagas disease
• high-throughput screening
• reporter genes
• surrogate markers
• Trypanosoma cruzi

Acknowledgments

Consortium members, advisors and other guests include F Buckner from University of Washington, J Bustamante from UGA, R Docampo from UGA, P Doyle-Engel from UCSF, J Engel from UCSF, L Fraisse from Sanofi-Aventis, R Glynne from Genomics Institute of the Novartis Foundation, J Ed Hall from University of North Carolina, A Kessler from GSK-Tres Cantos, S Laucella from Instituto Nacional de Parasitologia MF Chabén, M Ndao from McGill University, D Nicoll-Griffith from Merck, M Papadopoulou from NorthShore University Health Systems, HJ Park from UGA, S Robertson from UCSF, MJ Rogers from NIH-NIAID, A Rodriguez from New York University Medical Center, P Sabrado from Virginia Tech, F Supek from Genomics Institute of the Novartis Foundation, R Tarleton from UGA, J Urbina from Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research, R Viotti from Eva Peron Hospital, B Wang from Georgia State University and N Weich from Bio Ventures for Global Health. The Chagas Drug Discovery Consortium is supported by grant R01AI-082542 from the U.S. National Institutes of Health.