Mechanism of action of a drug candidate for the treatment of leishmaniasis
Coordinator :
Sébastien Pomel
Partners :
Financement :
Microscope inverse LEICA
Leishmaniasis chemotherapy should be considered according to a OneHealth approach, by developing new drugs active both in humans, and dogs that constitute the parasite reservoir for humans in Europe. This project aims to study the mechanism of action of a drug candidate and of its back-up newly discovered for the treatment of leishmaniasis. The compounds have been patented at the end of 2017, and a process of drug development has been launched including creation of a startup company. As Leishmania are intracellular parasites, the originality of this project is to develop drugs able to prevent the parasite installation within its host cell. By this way, we expect to prevent any drug resistance emergence as the compounds are selected to be inactive on the axenic form of the parasite but only on its intracellular form. This project focuses on the identification of the cellular and molecular targets affected by the compounds in the Leishmania-infected macrophages.