A student from Pakistan has made a discovery in Australia that could lead to a cure for a fatal flesh-eating disease.
Chemical compounds found in a unique Australian medical storage facility have shown promising results in early testing.
Known as a neglected tropical disease, leishmaniasis kills tens of thousands of people a year around the world.
It takes just one bite from the Phlebotomus sandfly and the parasitic infection is spread to a new host.
Leishmaniasis comes in various forms.
It can cause large ulcers on the skin, eat away the nose and face, and a fatal variant attacks the human liver and spleen.
Bilal Zulfiqar from Pakistan, is a PhD student at Griffith University in Brisbane.
He points to an image on his computer screen, explaining it is endemic in his home country.
"Yup, that's a human cell infected with the lieshamaniasis parasites."
The World Health Organisation calls it a "neglected tropical disease".
Bilal Zulfiqar says more than one million people are infected with the various forms of Leishmaniasis around the world every year.
"Mostly it's called neglected because pharmaceutical companies all around the globe are not working efficiently to discover the cure for the disease, and mostly it affects people from poor communities around the globe, so overall the margin for a pharmaceutical company to make a profit is really low."
About 350 million people live in affected areas and it has emerged in the Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan war zones.
Tens of thousands of people die every year and current treatments are prolonged and painful to administer.
The answer could be in the Griffith Institute for Drug Discovery, known as GRIDD, headed by professor Jenny Martin.
"So the unique resources we have at GRIDD include Compounds Australia, which is the nation's compounds collection, which stores and curates over 600,000 samples for drug discovery. We're at the very early stage of the drug pipeline and finding hits, which molecules do we want to focus on to develop drugs. We also work on devastating diseases like malaria, antibiotic resistance, cancer and Parkinson's disease."
It is here, after three years of testing, Bilal Zulfiqar made his discovery.
He hopes his work will lead to a more effective, less toxic cure.
"We have found two compounds that have very potent activity for the Leishmaniasis species we have in our lab on which we tested it. People have screened around one million compounds and they normally identify one hit, and so I was pretty lucky to identify the hits I got."
His work has already been internationally recognised but it is only the start of a long journey to developing a medicine, says his PhD supervisor and the director of the Discovery Biology Laboratory at Griffith University, Dr Vicky Avery.
(It can take) "Anywhere up to 15 years or more, but the attrition rate as you go through the drug discovery pipeline is incredibly high. There are very few good molecules available that could progress to develop into a new drug and we have limited knowledge about Leishmaniasis, so his work is important because the more we know, the more we understand, the better we are positioned to design new drugs."
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