Abstract
Before the advent of modern medicine, natural resources were widely used by indigenous populations for the prevention and treatment of diseases. The associated knowledge, collectively described as folk medicine or traditional medicine, was largely based on trial-and-error testing of plant extracts (herbal remedies) and the use of invertebrates, particularly medicinal maggots of the blowfly Lucilia sericata and blood-sucking leeches. The widespread use of traditional medicine in the West declined as scientific advances allowed reproducible testing under controlled conditions and gave rise to the modern fields of biomedical research and pharmacology. However, many drugs are still derived from natural resources, and interest in traditional medicine has been renewed by the ability of researchers to investigate the medical potential of diverse species by high-throughput screening. Likewise, researchers are starting to look again at the benefits of maggot and leech therapy, based on the hypothesis that the use of such animals in traditional medicine is likely to reflect the presence of specific bioactive molecules that can be developed as drug leads. In this review, we consider the modern medical benefits of European medicinal leeches based on the systematic screening of their salivary proteins.
Highlights
The benefits of leech therapy were evident from these studies, the salivary compounds responsible for these effects and the underlying molecular mechanisms were not characterized in detail
The three closely related species were found to share 39 orthologous clusters, whereas 50 orthologous clusters were shared by any two of the three species [44]. Many of these newly discovered leech salivary proteins are either associated with blood feeding or related to proteins found in animal venoms [44]
Several antistasins were identified in leech species, including (1) the prototype antistasin, isolated from the salivary glands of the Mexican leech, Haementeria officials; (2) hirustasin and bdellastasin, identified in H. medicinalis; (3) ghilanten, identified in Haementeria ghilianii; (4) piguamerin, identified in
Summary
European medicinal leeches of the genus Hirudo are blood-feeding annelids. Leeches attach to the host body surface and cut the skin using hundreds of calcified teeth [3]. They can draw blood for up to one hour while secreting saliva into the wound. Leeches inevitably make contact with (and ingest) some bacteria on the surface of the host’s skin during feeding, but the stored blood does not become overrun with pathogens. In most parasitic leeches the host blood is stored in the crop, while food digestion and the absorption of nutrients occur predominantly in the intestine. It can be assumed that medicinal leech enzymes (e.g., endopeptidases, aminopeptidases, phosphatases) promote digestion processes [14]
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