Breakthrough reported in fight against sleeping sickness

London, April 1 : British scientists have identified a new treatment for the potentially fatal disease known as African sleeping sickness, which infects tens of thousands of Africans each year.

The findings, published in the British journal "Nature", pave the way for the development of effective, orally administered, low toxicity drugs to treat the disease, Xinhua reported.

"This is one of the most significant findings made in recent years in terms of drug discovery and development for neglected diseases," said Professor Paul Wyatt, director of the Drug Discovery for Tropical Diseases program at the University of Dundee, Scotland.

The World Health Organization estimates between 50,000 and 70,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa are infected with sleeping sickness, or Human African Trypanosomiasis, which is spread by the bite of the tsetse fly.

The disease is caused by a single-celled parasite called trypanosome that can infect the brain and disrupt the sleep cycle.

Wyatt and his colleagues' breakthrough lies in developing a compound that disrupts an enzyme called N-myristoyl transferase, which is essential for survival and growth of the parasites.

The next step is to "develop these early molecules into candidate drugs for clinical trials," Wyatt said. The researchers predict that the drugs will be ready for human clinical trials in 18 months.

The Dundee research was backed by partners at the University of York and the Structural Genomics Consortium in Toronto, Canada.

Two drugs are currently available to treat sleeping sickness, but both have some drawbacks.

One is an arsenic-based drug that causes death in around one in 20 patients, and the other, eflornithine, is costly, requires prolonged hospital treatment and is not effective against all forms of the disease.