Sleeping sickness: time for dreaming.

Abstract

For a long time, the treatment of human African trypanosomiasis (HAT) represented for clinicians a journey through time, to the sources of colonial tropical medicine. Until 2018, the drugs available (apart from eflornithine), were commercialised during the first half of the 20th century.1 The pharmaceutical industry had no financial motivation to seek new products for a disease with a market representing a few tens of thousands of cases per year, living in rural and impoverished regions of sub-Saharan Africa.