American Society for Cell
Biology,
San Francisco, December, 2002
Soap slays sleeping sickness
Bacterial hangover renders parasite
susceptible to triclosan.
18 December 2002
HELEN PEARSON
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| Triclosan is common in
western cleaning products. |
| © alamy.com |
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The widespread killer sleeping sickness might be treated with
the cheap antibiotic triclosan, scientists revealed at the
American Society for Cell Biology meeting in San Francisco,
California, this week.
Transmitted by the tsetse fly, the disease affects up to
half-a-million people in rural sub-Saharan Africa. Kimberly Paul
of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, and
her team found that the causative parasite, Trypanosoma
brucei, stops growing in a tube infused with triclosan.
The antibiotic is common in today's Western cleaning
products: "You can't find a hand soap without it," says Paul. It
could be an improvement on existing drugs such as arsenic
derivatives, which are also toxic to patients.
The new finding is surprising because triclosan is an
antibacterial chemical - but T. brucei is not a bacteria.
It appears to have remnants of bacterial genes that render it
vulnerable to the drug, Paul found.
"It is both an exciting and anticipated development," says
Namita Surolia of Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced
Scientific Research in Bangalore, India. She and her colleagues
showed that the mosquito-borne malaria parasite Plasmodium
falciparum is also attacked by triclosan1.
Paul's team found that certain genes that T. brucei
uses to build molecules called fatty acids are more closely
related to equivalent genes in bacteria than those in mammals or
yeast. The researchers used DNA sequence data from the T.
brucei genome project.
This means that an antibacterial drug will attack the
parasite but not human cells. "That's what I find very
exciting," says Paul. "There's a pharmacopoeia of drugs designed
for other bacterial infections - maybe we could piggy-back off
those."
Researchers have yet to test whether the drug actually
alleviates the symptoms of sleeping sickness or malaria. They
might also be foiled if the wily parasites develop resistance to
triclosan. |
