Why Chagas' Disease matters

Chagas’ Disease, or American Trypanosomiasis, is one of the world’s most extended lethal parasitic infections. It is also the main cause of heart failure in Latin America. Around twenty million people are already infected, and each year this figure increases by fifty thousand. The population living in areas of infectious risk is around one hundred and twenty million people, roughly a quarter of Latin America’s population.

Despite all these facts this disease remains unattended because its insidious nature, although its mortality rate is high, it kills years, and even decades after the infection, frequently from heart failure, which figures in registrations as the official cause of death, eclipsing the role of the disease and diminishing its importance in the official registers. Often the person remains impaired during the last years of his life, unable to do any physical labour. In an urban environment this would not be a problem, but most of the affected live in rural areas, dependant of farming, inflicted with poverty, far away from the managers, a calamity that goes unnoticed by city-dwellers. All these facts combine to make Chagas’ Disease a silent tragedy that not only sever lives but distort them, making them unproductive and vulnerable long time before the death occurs.

Currently there are no effective treatments against Chagas’ Disease. The compounds already used, Nifurtimox and Benznidazole have plenty of side effects, besides they are only effective at the early stages of the infection, which are often unnoticed, in later stages, they are totally ineffective. Hopefully, new therapeutic alternatives are being designed, tailor made to attack the parasite without interfering with the host metabolism. Among the new approaches to deal with Trypanosoma cruzi are targeting the systems that allow the parasite’s consumption of glucose, its sole source of energy in the bloodstream and its systems for sterol synthesis, both necessary for the survival of the parasite. Several compounds that target the enzymes responsible for these systems have been successfully assayed, showing in vitro and in vivo activity against the parasite, besides having low or no detectable toxicity in cultured macaque cells and mice.

However, drug development is still a expensive endeavor and we might have to wait for long time before a cure is achieved.


More info about Chagas' Disease:


Doctors without borders
Wikipedia

And a rough translation of a fragment of "Chagas, a silent tragedy", by Eduardo Galeano:

It doesn't explode like bombs, it doesn't sound like shots. Like hunger, kills silencing. Like hunger, kills the silent ones: to the ones who live condemned to the silence and die condemned to oblivion. Tragedy that doesn't sound, sick people that do not pay, a disease that doesn't make any sell. Chagas' disease is no business that attracts pharmaceutic industry nor subject interesting to politicians or journalists.

Preparing my summer trip

Greetings!
This summer I will travel to the US and attend to three conferences: Transvision 2007 in Chicago, the World Future Society annual meeting in Minneapolis and the Science Foo Camp in Mountain View, California. I will speak about OS Biomedical Research in a student meeting associated to TV07, as it seems I am too young and unexperienced to be allowed on the main conference. Anyway, I will try to spread the meme and make more visible the problems that we have here dealing with diseases very well known but that have no cure, because they are not profitable for the industry.

In the WFS meeting I won't deliver any presentation, but I hope to discuss some of my work with the Millennium Project with the MP staff that will be there.

In Mountain View I will be at the famous Googleplex for the Science Foo Camp, new kind of conference, where there is no previous schedule, the contents are determined by the interaction of people. I hope to talk there about my current work at the MP, the importance of future studies, proper science education and skepticism, but also about OS Biomedical Research and the current efforts going in that way like The Synaptic Leap and current research done at my lab, testing the efficiency of already modelled compunds against Chagas' Disease. It would be a lot of fun, and I will try to learn as much as I can.

Here is my abstract on OS Biomedical Research:

Open Source Biomedical Research and Computational Biology can improve drug design and help to fight neglected diseases.

Abstract:

Several hundred millions of people around the world are affected by neglected diseases. One of the challenges they encounter is that the development of treatments for these diseases is not profitable for the private sector, as most of the affected are among the poorest people in the world. These diseases tend to attack people in tropical regions of Africa, Asia and the Americas, often in a chronic way, disabling people for years and causing further poverty and decay, in a downward spiral. Until now, the process of developing new drugs has been cumbersome and expensive, yielding many ineffective or highly toxic products, due to an approach based on random testing of substances.

Now, with new methods in computational chemistry, it is possible to design new drugs in rational way that targets specific parts of a given virus, bacteria or parasite, while it bypasses the equivalent parts in humans. This approach might save a great amount of time and resources previously wasted on useless compounds or on effective compounds against useless targets, which, in turn, could reduce the cost of drug development. However, even with these new tools, most commercial partners are still not interested in developing drugs for poor markets.

A possible solution to this problem is the application of the “Open Source” approach to drug development. The Open Source (OS) approach in software has shown it is possible to create useful, reliable and efficient products through a voluntary, collaborative process. In biology the OS approach could be used for collaborative non-profit research, aiming to avoid the duplication of efforts and the release of patent-free compounds for neglected diseases in a relatively short period of time, thanks to the new computational methods and distributed efforts; moreover, as these methods become increasingly efficient and the available information about pathogens grows (regarding genomes, expression patterns, etc.), a OS collaboration could make the process of drug development even cheaper and more efficient, and even allow for the creation of "backup drugs" to tackle the problem of drug resistance before it appears.

Keywords : Systems Biology, Open Source Biomedical Research, Neglected Diseases.

I am really surprised I got invited to Scifoo, given the extremely high level of the attendees and that I still (yes, shame on me, but I chose to take computational physics too) am an undergrad. But this is a perfect example fof the reasons I created this blog: In this age you don't have to be wealthy or live in the developed world to help to develop new things, to be in contact, to get opportunities like this. Even ten years ago this would have been impossible even in my wildest dreams. This, my readers, is a praise to globalization. I only am sad that many people smart enough to get opportunities like this is lacking a proper education. I dream of the day that is corrected and we, all mankind, can use our brains and hands to solve our current problems.