Journal
FRONTIERS IN CELLULAR AND INFECTION MICROBIOLOGY
Volume 11, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
FRONTIERS MEDIA SA
DOI: 10.3389/fcimb.2021.633194
Keywords
drug development; parasites; protein degradation; drug repurposing and repositioning; disulfiram (Antabuse)
Categories
Funding
- NIH [R01AI026649, K08AI119181]
- Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Program Award
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Parasitic infections have significant global impact on human health; Drug repurposing is a faster and cheaper way of drug development with potential to address current treatment issues of parasitic infections; Disulfiram as a potential repurposed drug for anti-parasitic use warrants further research.
Parasitic infections contribute significantly to worldwide morbidity and mortality. Antibiotic treatment is essential for managing patients infected with these parasites since control is otherwise challenging and there are no vaccines available for prevention. However, new antimicrobial therapies are urgently needed as significant problems exist with current treatments such as drug resistance, limited options, poor efficacy, as well as toxicity. This situation is made worse by the challenges of drug discovery and development which is costly especially for non-profitable infectious diseases, time-consuming, and risky with a high failure rate. Drug repurposing which involves finding new use for existing drugs may help to more rapidly identify therapeutic candidates while drastically cutting costs of drug research and development. In this perspective article, we discuss the importance of drug repurposing, review disulfiram pharmacology, and highlight emerging data that supports repurposing disulfiram as an anti-parasitic, exemplified by the major diarrheacausing parasite Entamoeba histolytica.
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