Abstract
Human African Trypanosomiasis (HAT), Chagas disease or American Trypanosomiasis (CD), and leishmaniases are protozoan infections produced by trypanosomatid parasites belonging to the kinetoplastid order and they constitute an urgent global health problem. In fact, there is an urgent need of more efficient and less toxic chemotherapy for these diseases. Medicinal inorganic chemistry currently offers an attractive option for the rational design of new drugs and, in particular, antiparasitic ones. In this sense, one of the main strategies for the design of metal-based antiparasitic compounds has been the coordination of an organic ligand with known or potential biological activity, to a metal centre or an organometallic core. Classical metal coordination complexes or organometallic compounds could be designed as multifunctional agents joining, in a single molecule, different chemical species that could affect different parasitic targets. This review is focused on the rational design of palladium(II) and platinum(II) compounds with bioactive ligands as prospective drugs against trypanosomatid parasites that has been conducted by our group during the last 20 years.
Highlights
Seventeen infectious diseases have been named by the World Health Organization (WHO) as Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs), mainly due to low pharmaceutical industry investment in drug research because of the low associated revenue
Human African Trypanosomiasis (HAT), Chagas disease or American Trypanosomiasis (CD), and leishmaniases are protozoan infections produced by trypanosomatid parasites belonging to the kinetoplastid order
The development of metal-based compounds for the treatment of diseases caused by trypanosomatid parasites has evolved from rather isolated serendipitous efforts to a more rational and systematic strategy
Summary
Seventeen infectious diseases have been named by the World Health Organization (WHO) as Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs), mainly due to low pharmaceutical industry investment in drug research because of the low associated revenue. Human African Trypanosomiasis (HAT), Chagas disease or American Trypanosomiasis (CD), and leishmaniases are protozoan infections produced by trypanosomatid parasites belonging to the kinetoplastid order. These are among the most important neglected diseases and constitute an urgent health problem in developing countries. They are often co-endemic in certain regions of the world (Leishmaniasis and Chagas’ disease in South America and Leishmaniasis and HAT in Africa) and they have span worldwide because of globalization caused by human migration. Despite being some of the most life-threatening infective diseases, only a poor and inadequate chemotherapy is available (De Rycker et al, 2018; Santos et al, 2020; Kourbeli et al, 2021)
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