Potential new clinical therapies for Chagas disease

Abstract

Chagas disease is the highest impact parasitic disease in the Americas but often goes untreated due to the shortcomings of currently available therapeutics. Thus there is an urgent need for new treatment options and growing interest in drug development for the infection. This review summarizes some of the recent advances and failures in this realm, with particular emphasis on recently published studies and unpublished results presented at a recent Chagas Drug Discovery Consortium meeting.

Keywords::

• Chagas disease
• clinical trials
• drug discovery
• drug treatment
• Trypanosoma cruzi

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the contributions of participants in the Chagas Drug Discovery Consortium for openly sharing their experimental results prior to publication and for useful discussions. We apologize for details and results from the Consortium that could not be more extensively discussed in this review. We also thank the other members of the Tarleton lab for their contributions to the research discussed from our laboratory. The views expressed here are those of the authors and are not necessarily shared by all those being acknowledged.

Financial & competing interests disclosure

This work was supported by grants PO1 AI-44979 and RO1 AI-44979. The authors are employees of The University of Georgia. The authors have no other 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 apart from those disclosed.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.

Key issues

• Chagas disease is a major health problem that affects the Americas as well as other nonendemic regions due to migration.

• There are no vaccines for the prevention of Trypanosoma cruzi infection and there are two available drugs for the treatment of Chagas disease, both with potential side effects and variable efficacy.

• The discovery of new compounds and better treatment options for T. cruzi infection is still an urgent need.

• Several specific targets are being evaluated for the identification of anti-T. cruzi compounds.

• Combination treatments and improved dosing protocols could lead to new regimens for the treatment of Chagas disease using existing compounds.

• Several candidate compounds have moved forward into clinical trials and more are expected in the coming future.