Scientists take a step towards better sleeping sickness treatment

The team at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Molecular Parasitology has gained new insight into a specific protein within the parasite responsible for the disease, which could help in the design of new parasite-specific drugs.

Transmitted by the tsetse fly, sleeping sickness is a neglected tropical disease spread by the Trypanosoma brucei parasite. There are no effective vaccines for this disease and many of the drugs used to treat it are highly toxic. Left untreated it is invariably fatal.

Scientists believe that a better way of fighting the disease would be to target specific proteins in the parasite called metacaspases, which have been shown to be important for its survival.

A first step in creating such a drug is to understand the structure of the proteins and scientists at Glasgow have successfully determined the first three-dimensional structure of a metacapase – one of five found within T. brucei – using X-ray crystallography.

Karen McLuskey, a senior research associate in the Wellcome Trust Centre for Molecular Parasitology, said: “This structure allows us to visualise important details of how the metacaspase interacts with the proteins that it is destined to destroy”.

Professor Jeremy Mottram, leader of the research team, said “Overall, this structure provides a means towards designing specific inhibitors of metacaspases that can potentially be used for the development of novel drugs against parasitic diseases.”

The research, ‘Crystal structure of a Trypanosoma brucei metacaspase’, was funded by The Wellcome Trust and Medical Research Council and is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.