Nano Based Approach for the Treatment of Neglected Tropical Diseases

Abstract

Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) afflict more than one billion peoples in the world’s poorest countries. The World Health Organization (WHO) has recorded seventeen NTDs in its portfolio, mainly caused by bacterial, protozoal, parasitic, and viral infections. Each of the NTDs has its unique challenges on human health such as interventions for control, prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. Research for the development of new drug molecules against NTDs has not been undertaken by pharmaceutical industries due to high investment and low-returns, which results in limited chemotherapeutics in the market. In addition, conventional chemotherapies for the treatment of NTDs are unsatisfactory due to its low efficacy, increased drug resistance, short half-life, potential or harmful fatal toxic side effects, and drug incompetence to reach the site of parasite infection. In this context, active chemotherapies are considered to be re-formulated by overcoming these toxic side effects via a tissue-specific targeted drug delivery system. This review mainly emphasizes the recent developments of nanomaterial-based drug delivery systems for the effective treatment of NTDs especially sleeping sickness, leishmaniasis, chagas disease, soil-transmitted helminthiasis, african trypanosomiasis and dengue. Nanomaterials based drug delivery systems offer enhanced and effective alternative therapy through the re-formulation approach of conventional drugs into site-specific targeted delivery of drugs.

Leishmaniasis and Chagas disease: Is there hope in nanotechnology to fight neglected tropical diseases?

“…BNZ toxicity results from the required administration of high oral doses of drug that are required to achieve a therapeutic plasma dose; this is largely due to the drug's high hydrophobicity. Improvements in BNZ formulation have been achieved (Davanco et al, 2016;Bezerra et al, 2020;Amaral et al, 2021;Ndayishimiye et al, 2021) and micro-and nano-carriers have emerged as a strategy to decrease BNZ toxicity by overcoming poor aqueous solubility, increasing BNZ bioavailability and increasing concentration inside T. cruzi infected cells (Quezada et al, 2019;Seremeta et al, 2019;Pandian et al, 2021).…”

Diversity and prevalence of zoonotic infections at the animal-human interface of primate trafficking in Peru

“…These widespread infections contribute significantly to human morbidity, mortality, and disability in low and middle income countries (LMIC), disproportionally affecting impoverished communities and vulnerable populations without proper access to water and sanitation [ 100 ]. The World Health Organization (WHO) lists Chagas disease, caused by Trypanosoma cruzi , and soil-transmitted helminthiasis as neglected tropical diseases affecting approximately eight and two million people, respectively [ 101 ]. Plasmodium malariae/brasilianum and MTBC cause human malaria and tuberculosis respectively, two diseases that took the lives of more than two million people in 2020 alone and currently account for the largest burden of infectious diseases in tropical countries [ 100 ].…”

Leishmaniasis

“…Ongoing approximations of prevalence of cutaneous leishmaniasis range from 700,000 to 1.2 million cases annually (Thakur et al 2020), by roughly 95 percent of cases happening in the Central Asia, Mediterranean basin, Americas, and the Middle East (Mohammed and Alkhafaji 2021), despite the fact that it is likely underreported. Visceral leishmaniasis (VL) cases are estimated to be less than 100,000 annually, (down from 400,000 in previous estimates) (Servadio et al 2020) over 95% cases conveyed to the WHO particularly from India, Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nepal, Brazil, China and Sudan (Pandian et al 2021). An immunocompromised state poor hygiene, population morbidity, malnutrition and poverty are all risk factors for leishmaniasis (Alves et al 2020).…”