Pharmaceutical agents for treatment of leishmaniasis: a patent landscape

ABSTRACT

Introduction

Leishmaniasis is a neglected tropical disease caused by protozoa of the genus Leishmania. Worldwide, approximately 1.5–2 million new cases of leishmaniasis and 20,000–30,000 deaths occurs each year. Effective treatment for all forms of leishmaniasis have numerous adverse effects contributing to poor adherence and/or treatment interruption by the patient. Development of novel therapies, as multitarget drugs, for example, can contribute to accelerate discover safer, more active, and patient-compliant drugs for leishmaniasis treatment.

Areas covered

In this review, authors summarize pharmaceutical agents for treatment of leishmaniasis developed between 2014 and 2019, which includes synthetic and natural drugs for specific treatments, as well as considering new approaches and strategies using drug delivery system.

Expert opinion

Universities or public research institutes produced most of the patents related to pharmaceutical agents for treatment of leishmaniasis in this review, and the majority of the inventions disclosed did not conduct clinical trials. In other words, there is still a lot of investment to be done for the identification of new drugs.

KEYWORDS:

• Leishmania
• drugs
• natural products
• visceral leishmaniasis
• cutaneous leishmaniasis
• mucosal leishmaniasis
• intellectual property

Article highlights

• Most of the described inventions are still in the pre-clinical stage.

• For the first time it was demonstrated that a selection of adamantane and bicyclic monoterpenoid derivatives prepared by a variety of synthetic routes showed a strong antileishmanial activity.

• (-)-α-bisabolol is able to activate a programmed cell death process in the promastigote stage of the parasite. Moreover, it decreases the mitochondrial membrane potential and total adenosine triphosphate (ATP) levels, well as causes phosphatidylserine externalization and membrane damage.

• Immunotoxins, patented under number WO 2016/116550, possibly will kill extra-macrophagic parasites, consequently dropping the proliferation of infection.

• Researchers have reported the potential in vivo of nanoparticles against leishmanicidal activity.

This box summarizes key points contained in the article.

Reviewer disclosures

Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose.

Declaration of interest

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

Additional information

Funding

This study was financed by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brazil (CAPES); National Council for Scientific and Technological Development – CNPq and FAPITEC-SE. The authors kindly acknowledged funding agencies for providing grants supports.