An overseas student from Pakistan has discovered compounds in a little-known Australian medical research facility that could lead to a cure for a fatal flesh-eating disease.
Categorised as a neglected tropical disease by the World Health Organisation, Leishmaniasis kills tens of thousands of people a year around the world.
Chemical compounds found in the national collection stored at Compounds Australia in Brisbane have shown promising results in early testing.
It takes just one bite from the female Phelbotomus sandfly and the parasitic Leishmaniasis infection is spread to a new human host.
The flesh-eating form of the disease causes large, unsightly lesions and one variant attacks the human liver and spleen and is fatal.
“It’s very exciting, we’ve found two compounds,” said Griffith University Phd student Bilal Zulfiqar from Pakistan where Leishmaniasis is endemic.
“People have screened one-million compounds and then get one hit, and so I was pretty lucky to identify the hits I got.”
More that 1.3 million people are infected with the various forms of Leishmaniasis, also known as kala azar, around the world every year.
The disease is thought to have emerged in Bangaldesh in the 1800s and has since spread around the world.
About 350 million people live in affected areas in the Indian sub-continent, Middle East, Africa and South America.
Tens of thousands of people die annually.
More that 1.3 million people are infected with the various forms of Leishmaniasis every year. (World Health Organisation) Source: SBS World News
“If a sand fly takes a blood meal, it takes in the parasites and they grow in sandfly, and when it bites a human it then transmits to the human,” said Mr Zulfiqar.
The only human cases in Australia are brought in from overseas.
In the last decade there have been outbreaks of Leishmaniasis in war zones in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan and southern Europe also regularly has a limited number of cases.
“Mostly it affects people from poor communities around the globe, so overall the margin for the pharmaceutical industry to make a profit is really low,” said Mr Zulfiqar.
“It’a difficult for patients to administer the existing drugs by themselves, so they have to go to a clinic, most of they time it is painful, because it has to be injected under the lesion, where sand fly the makes a bite and an ulcer develops.”
There is currently one oral drug and its effectiveness is declining.
“The purpose of finding new compounds is for them to be more effective, have less side effects and a good route of administration as an oral drug,” he said.
During three years of research Mr Zulfiqar found two chemical compounds in the Griffith Institute for Drug Discovery (GRIDD) in Brisbane.
Patients at the Leishmaniasis treatment centre located in the National Malaria and Leishmanasis centre located in Dar Al Aman, Kabul. (World Health Organisation) Source: World Health Organisation
“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,” said GRIDD director professor Jenny Martin.
“We’re at the very early stage of the drug pipeline and we focus on devastating diseases like malaria, anti-biotic resistance, cancer and Parkinson’s disease.”
Mr Zulfiqar’s work has already been internationally recognised but it is only the start of a long journey to developing a medicine.
“It could take anywhere up to 15 years or more, but the attrition rate as you go through the drug discovery pipeline is incredibly high,” said Dr Vicky Avery, director of the Discovery Biology Laboratory at Griffith Uni and Mr Zulifar’s Phd supervisor.
“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 better we are positioned to find new drugs."
