African Sleeping Sickness News and Research

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African trypanosomiasis is also known as sleeping sickness. There are two types of African trypanosomiasis, East and West, named for the region of Africa in which they were historically found. People can get the disease if they are bitten by an infected tsetse fly, which is only found in Africa. Treatment is available for African trypanosomiasis, but it is fatal if left untreated.

UCI professor wins Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists & Engineers

Rommie Amaro, UC Irvine assistant professor of pharmaceutical sciences and computer science, has been selected by President Obama for the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists & Engineers.

28 Sep 2011

Information and communications technology revolution in the developing world

Charles Ebikeme, a writer who "has worked for many years as a research scientist on African sleeping sickness" examines a health revolution in information and communications technology (ICT) taking place across the developing world in this "End the Neglect" blog post, writing, "The initial concept of telemedicine now spans a wide spectrum of applications, labels, contexts, and platforms."

3 Sep 2011

Drug companies collaborate with DNDi support to develop drug for African sleeping sickness

Researchers from Scynexis Inc. of Research Triangle Park, N.C., and Anacor Pharmaceuticals in Palo Alto, Calif., sponsored by the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative, on Tuesday reported in the journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases that a new experimental drug kills the parasite that causes African sleeping sickness in mice and will enter human clinical trials this year, ScienceNOW reports.

30 Jun 2011

MMV honors UT Southwestern with Project of the Year for new anti-malarial drug discovery

The discovery of a potential new anti-malarial drug by a UT Southwestern Medical Center-led research team has been awarded Project of the Year by Medicines for Malaria Venture.

7 Jun 2011

Scientists discover new compounds that may help fight against parasitic diseases

Trypanosomatid parasites cause diseases like African sleeping sickness, Chagas' disease and leishmaniasis. Leishmaniasis affects about 12 million people worldwide, mostly in developing countries. Current drug treatments are inadequate due to drug toxicity and resistance.

5 Apr 2011

Anacor Pharma, MMV enter agreement to develop AN3661 for malaria treatment

Anacor Pharmaceuticals announced today that it has entered into a development agreement with Medicines for Malaria Venture to develop Anacor's compound AN3661 for the treatment of malaria.

18 Mar 2011

Anacor and iOWH establish research agreement to identify new drugs for shigellosis

Anacor Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:ANAC) and the Institute for OneWorld Health (iOWH) today announced the establishment of a joint research agreement to discover antibacterial compounds for treating shigellosis.

8 Mar 2011

African sleeping sickness parasite's previously unrecognized extreme social behavior discovered

Long considered a freewheeling loner, the Trypanosoma brucei parasite responsible for African sleeping sickness has revealed a totally unexpected social side, opening a potential chink in the behavioral armor of this and other supposedly solitary human parasites, according to research presented at the American Society for Cell Biology's 50th Annual Meeting in Philadelphia.

15 Dec 2010

Anacor, UCSF and NYBC collaborate to discover drug therapies for river blindness

Anacor Pharmaceuticals, the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Sandler Center and the Lindsley F. Kimball Research Institute (LFKRI) of the New York Blood Center (NYBC) today announced the establishment of a research and development collaboration to discover new drug therapies for the treatment of river blindness (onchocerciasis), a parasitic disease that is the second leading cause of infectious blindness worldwide, and is most prevalent in Africa.

1 Dec 2010

Research on trypanosomes can open way for African sleeping sickness drug development

Trypanosomes are parasites responsible for many human and animal diseases, primarily in tropical climates. One disease these parasites cause, African sleeping sickness, results from the bite of infected tsetse flies, putting over 60 million Africans at risk in 36 sub-Saharan countries. The recent 1998-2001 sleeping sickness epidemics in South Sudan, Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda killed tens of thousands of people and resulted in over a half million infected individuals.

31 Aug 2010

Researchers discover genetic explanation for non-diabetic kidney disease in African-Americans

Kidney disease is a growing public health problem, with approximately half a million individuals in the United States requiring dialysis treatments to replace the function of their failed kidneys. The problem is particularly acute among African-Americans, whose rates of kidney disease are four times higher than those of European Americans.

20 Jul 2010

Drug initiative granted rights to develop TB compounds for potential treatment of NTDs

The Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative now has the rights to "develop a class of potential anti-[tuberculosis] compounds" for the treatment of Chagas disease, African sleeping sickness and leishmaniasis, Reuters reports (Nebehay, 7/7).

8 Jul 2010

New bacterial species in tsete fly may help control African sleeping sickness

A new bacterial species, found in the gut of the fly that transmits African sleeping sickness, could be engineered to kill the parasite that causes the disease. The study, published in the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology, could lead to new approaches to control this fatal infection that is becoming resistant to drug therapy.

11 May 2010

Phase I clinical trial of DFMO initiated to treat children with neuroblastoma

A new Phase I clinical trial sponsored by the Vermont Cancer Center at the University of Vermont and Fletcher Allen Health Care has opened to test the investigational drug DFMO, or alpha-difluoromethylornithine, as a treatment for the pediatric cancer neuroblastoma.

15 Apr 2010

New development in treatment of African Sleeping Sickness

African sleeping sickness or Human African Typanosomiasis is a potentially fatal disease affecting 50 to 70 thousand Africans each year. Carried by the bite tsetse fly this fatal disease is actually caused by a tiny parasite that attacks the nervous system, brain, spinal column resulting in mental confusion and finally death.

1 Apr 2010

Major breakthrough may help develop low toxicity drugs for sleeping sickness

Scientists from the Drug Discovery Unit at the University of Dundee - working together with partners at the University of York and the Structural Genomics Consortium in Toronto - have made a major breakthrough in identifying new treatments for a fatal disease which infects tens of thousands of Africans each year.

1 Apr 2010

SRI International researchers to disclose preliminary results of NTD detecting diagnostic at 239th ACS

SRI International, an independent nonprofit research and development organization, will present preliminary results of a diagnostic to detect neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) at the 239th National Meeting & Exhibition of the American Chemical Society (ACS) being held on March 21-25 in San Francisco.

22 Mar 2010

'Dipstick' 3-in-1 test for detection of Chagas' disease, leishmaniasis and African trypanosomiasis

A new simple, inexpensive three-in-one test to diagnose a terrible trio of parasitic diseases that wreak havoc in the developing world is passing preliminary tests, scientists reported here today. Described during the 239th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society the test is for Chagas' disease, leishmaniasis, and "sleeping sickness" or African trypanosomiasis.

22 Mar 2010

NIH awards $14.6M for Eukaryotic Pathogen Genome Database Resource expansion

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Georgia have been awarded a five-year, $14.6 million contract from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the US National Institutes of Health, to expand and extend work on the Eukaryotic Pathogen Genome Database Resource, http://EuPathDB.org.

11 Dec 2009

New consortium to tackle African sleeping sickness and Leishmaniasis

A new consortium has been formed to boost drug development for the treatment of two deadly diseases, African sleeping sickness and Leishmaniasis, which affect millions of people worldwide.

17 Aug 2009