8 October 2008

£1.7million to strip the coat off African sleeping sickness

Researchers at the University of Dundee have been granted £1.7million by the Wellcome Trust to try and find the chink in the armour of one of the world’s most neglected tropical diseases.

Scientists in the College of Life Sciences at Dundee are investigating how the devastating disease of African Sleeping Sickness can be stopped. The disease kills at least 50,000 people per year in sub-Saharan Africa, with hundreds of thousands more infected. There is no current vaccine to treat the disease and current drugs are extremely toxic and difficult to administer.

Professors Mike Ferguson and Ian Gilbert have been awarded the £1.7million grant to examine how the parasite which transmits the disease builds its vital protective coat.

'African Sleeping Sickness is transmitted by a parasite called a trypanosome,' explained Professor Ferguson. “What we are looking at is how that parasite builds its surface coat, a sort of protective shell, and how we can stop that.

'This coat helps protect the parasite against the host immune system, which then allows the disease to take hold. We want to understand how the parasite builds the components of the coat so that we can then devise new modes of attack to weaken it.'

'The hope is that the protective coat will also be the trypanosome’s Achilles heel.'

Dundee is uniquely placed in the academic world in being able to follow the whole process through from making the basic molecular findings that may unlock the assembly of the coat, to testing these as drug targets in the Drug Discovery Unit, which was created in 2006 with the express intention of tackling neglected diseases.

'These is very little interest in diseases like African Sleeping Sickness within the pharmaceutical industry, primarily because there is not likely to be much money in finding and developing a cure for the very poor,' said Professor Ferguson.

'That is why we established our unit here, so that we can identify drug targets and test them thoroughly and hopefully find new drugs which can help us get rid of these terribly debilitating diseases.'

NOTES TO EDITORS
The Wellcome Trust is the largest charity in the UK. It funds innovative biomedical research, in the UK and internationally, spending over £600 million each year to support the brightest scientists with the best ideas. The Wellcome Trust supports public debate about biomedical research and its impact on health and wellbeing. http://www.wellcome.ac.uk.

The Drug Discovery Unit at the University of Dundee was opened by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, the RT Hon Gordon Brown MP in January 2006. He described the £13million initiative as 'a unit which gives hope to 30 million people in areas such as sub-Saharan Africa and India'.

The University of Dundee team is renowned for their academic contributions to tropical disease research. Together, they integrate many disciplines directed towards the discovery of new therapies for tropical diseases.

There are over 140,000 reported deaths from African sleeping sickness, Chagas’ Disease and leishmaniasis each year, although it is generally agreed this figure is an underestimate because of the lack of medical reporting in many under-developed countries.

The parasites causing these diseases are protozoan microbes spread by blood-sucking insects, and afflict millions of people. At present no vaccines exist to prevent these debilitating and often lethal infections.

The drug discovery programme at the University of Dundee matches the goals of both the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (www.dndi.org) and the UNICEF-UNDP-World Bank-WHO Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases.

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Roddy Isles
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E-MAIL: r.isles@dundee.ac.uk