Deadly parasites reveal Achilles’ heel
Media Release, Wednesday 8 June 2005
Many parasites are hard to fight because their cells are so similar to ours that the drugs we use kill our cells too. Now, Bio21 Institute researchers at the University of Melbourne have discovered a potential Achilles’ heel which could allow us to take on the parasites that cause millions of human deaths worldwide from leishmaniasis and tuberculosis, without the cost to our own cells.
While leishmaniasis is largely unknown in the West, it infects at least 12 million people worldwide and is re-emerging in the West.
American troops returning from Iraq have been told not to give blood for a year to prevent the possible spread of the parasite into the US blood supply. Last year, the parasite was found in kangaroos in northern Australia.
Spread by mosquito-like sandflies, the leishmania parasite infects certain white blood cells known as macrophages. Its biochemistry is so close to ours that the drugs used to fight it also damage our own cells.
No more. A research team, led by Bio21 biochemist Associate Professor Malcolm McConville, has discovered the parasite doesn’t use glucose for energy storage, as we do. It uses a different sugar, mannose, instead.
The discovery was announced today at the opening of the University of Melbourne’s $100 million Bio21 Institute by Victorian Premier Steve Bracks.
“This is an exciting discovery that opens the way to new drugs to fight parasitic diseases,” says Professor Dick Wettenhall, director of the Bio21 Institute. “Now the biochemists and chemists at the Bio21 Institute are working to identify drug targets. This is just the kind of collaborative work using the latest equipment that the Bio21 Institute was set up to do.”
“We expect the combination of research, business, sophisticated laboratories and equipment at the Bio21 Institute, to transform the way the University turns inventions into real world solutions,” says Professor Wettenhall.
The Bio21 Institute will grow in the next 2 years to host up to 450 researchers (including more than 150 students) and 15 companies.
“Our discovery not only offers hope for leishmaniasis,” says Associate Professor McConville. “It may help us develop drugs for many other microbial pathogens which use mannose – including those involved in malaria and tuberculosis.”
A major problem in coping with tuberculosis is the cell wall itself. “It stands alone from other bacteria,” says Associate Professor McConville, “a waxy, impervious barrier resistant to almost all commonly used antibiotics.
“We’ve found that without mannose the bacterium cannot form new walls and divide, and it eventually dies,” he says. His team has already started work on development of potential drugs that will target this weakness.
Please contact Niall Byrne on 0417 131 977, Sarah Brooker on 0413 332 489, or Elaine Mulcahy 0421 641 506 for more information.
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