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By Penny Stern, MD
NEW YORK, Mar 08 (Reuters Health) - An international team of researchers has found that drugs used to treat osteoporosis could hold the key to new treatments for parasitic infections that affect 3 billion people around the world.
The new approach could combat diseases like malaria and African sleeping sickness, which are scourges of the developing world, "many of which are becoming drug-resistant," Dr. Eric Oldfield told Reuters Health.
In the United States, parasites cause opportunistic infections of AIDS patients, such as diarrhea and toxoplasmosis, "and new approaches to controlling them are needed," he said.
Oldfield, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, together with colleagues there and in Venezuela and the UK, looked at the effects of drugs called bisphosphonates on a group of common disease-causing parasites. They tested compounds including Merck's Fosamax, Procter and Gamble's Actonel, and Novartis' Aredia.
In their laboratory experiments, the researchers determined that these compounds stopped the parasites from growing.
Why should these drugs, developed to prevent bone loss, have any effects on these parasitic organisms? The answer lies in the parasites' metabolism, according to Oldfield.
Apparently, bisphsophonate drugs interfere with enzymes involved in a key metabolic step required by the parasites to sustain life.
"Part of the reason we think these drugs work so well in the parasites is that there are specialized organelles in (the parasites) which appear to bind the bisphosphonates," Oldfield explained.
Writing in the online edition of the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry for March 15th, the researchers explain that their results "represent the first detailed screening of a library of bisphosphonates" for use against the parasites that cause African sleeping sickness, Chagas disease, leishmaniasis, toxoplasmosis and malaria.
As to the team's next step, Oldfield said that additional "animal testing and, of course, as appropriate, clinical trials," are needed. "The animal testing results so far have been extremely encouraging," he said.
The investigators' work has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, as well as the World Health Organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
SOURCE: Journal of Medicinal Chemistry March 15, 2001.
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