A research team from the University of Texas at El Paso is one step closer to developing an effective human vaccine against cutaneous leishmaniasis, a tropical disease in Texas and Oklahoma, affecting some US troops stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq. ]
Eva Iniguez, PhD student in the biological sciences of UTEP; her mentors Rosa Maldonado, Ph.D., and Igor Almeida, Ph.D .; and their teams and collaborators in Liverpool (Alvaro Acosta-Serrano, Ph.D.) and Saudi Arabia (Waleed Al-Salem, Ph.D.), recently published their research findings in PLOS diseases neglected tropical, the first newspaper devoted solely to the most neglected tropical diseases in the world.
Leishmaniasis is caused by the protozoa leishmania parasites, which are transmitted by the bite of infected female sandflies - flies three times smaller than a mosquito. According to the World Health Organization, it is estimated that there are between 700,000 and 1 million new cases each year and that they cause 20,000 to 30,000 deaths each year. The disease affects some of the poorest people on Earth. Although it is found in more than 90 countries in the tropics, subtropics and southern Europe, naturally transmitted cases have also been found in northeastern Texas and in the United States. ;Oklahoma. The disease affected 2,000 US troops stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"I think we are in a very good position with this vaccine candidate," Maldonado said. "I think it's very promising and that if all goes well, I think we'll be able to introduce this vaccine for clinical purposes in the future."
For more than four years of research at the UTEP Border Biomedical Research Center, they discovered a vaccine formulation that resulted in a 96% decrease in the number of lesions caused by the disease and a protection rate of 86%. %. . The team relied on the expertise of Katja Michael, Ph.D., a UTEP chemist, to synthesize the molecules used in the study.
"It was really hard to get to this point," Iniguez said. "There has been a lot of standardization, but I am very happy, it is an important protection that we have observed and we have all the immunology to understand how the vaccine works in the system."
Maldonado and Almeida have each been studying Chagas disease for more than 25 years and recently received a patent for the first synthetic vaccine against Chagas disease. This work helped them to initiate this research with leishmaniasis because the molecules are different in diseases, but there are similar carbohydrates between parasites.
The team has filed a patent application for its cutaneous vaccine against leishmaniasis. Currently, there is no vaccine against the disease in humans. The treatment currently used is very toxic, painful and long - requiring hospitalization of patients for nearly three weeks for intravenous treatment. There is a vaccine to treat cutaneous leishmaniasis in dogs. Its use is approved in the United Kingdom.
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