How Disease Detectives Unearthed A Forgotten Drug To Fight A Lethal Illness

This article is part HuffPost’s Project Zero campaign, a yearlong series on neglected tropical diseases and efforts to eliminate them. One morning a few years ago, a vial containing just a few drops of a long-forgotten drug candidate arrived at the office of bioengineer Els Torreele in Switzerland.  The compound, fexinidazole, had been studied at a drug company several decades earlier, but researchers had given up on it for no clear reason. Torreele had asked the company to unearth whatever it had left from its archive, hoping to get her hands on the final clue in a long process of painstaking detective work.  This was one of hundreds of drug samples Torreele had been chasing. She and her team were reaching out to scientists around the world, seeking a potential medicine for a neglected tropical disease that was in dire need of a new treatment: human African trypanosomiasis, also known as sleeping sickness.  Torreele hoped the compound she was looking for was hiding somewhere in a dusty drawer full of old research, waiting for someone to locate it and put it to use. And after years of searching and testing, it turns out she was on to something. What she and her team found could transform the way a deadly disease is treated.  Sleeping sickness is caused when the blood-sucking tsetse fly bites humans, transmitting the microscopic parasite Trypanosoma brucei. The parasite stays in the blood for months or even years, causing bouts of flu-...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news