Development grant
Scientists at Dundee University, Scotland have been granted £1.7 million by the research charity the Wellcome Trust to try and elucidate how trypanosome, the parasite that causes the tropical disease sleeping sickness, generates its protective coat.
Sleeping sickness kills at least 50,000 people per year in sub-Saharan Africa, with hundreds of thousands more infected. There is no vaccine and existing drug treatments are extremely toxic and difficult to administer.
“What we are looking at is how that parasite builds its surface coat, a sort of protective shell, and how we can stop that,” said one of the researchers, Mike Ferguson. The coat helps protect the parasite against the host immune system, allows the disease to take hold.
Dundee has a specialised Drug Discovery Unit, which was set up in 2006 to tackle neglected diseases.
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