Dados do Trabalho

Name: 58º Congresso da Sociedade Brasileira de Medicina Tropical
Start: 2023-09-10
End: 2023-09-13
Location: Centro de Convenções de Salvador

Título

HIGHLIGHT IN DRUG DISCOVERY AND DEVELOPMENT AGAINST TROPICAL PROTOZOA DISEASES: USING RADIOTRACERS

Introdução

Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs), such as leishmaniasis, toxoplasmosis, Chagas disease, giardiasis, and many others, have a high impact on global public health, affecting 1,5 billion people worldwide. Drug discovery and development is a long and high-cost process being an even bigger problem when considering the lack of availability of drugs for NTDs, which do not have investments for the research of new treatments. Often, promising molecules do not reach clinics as they are abandoned halfway through development, due to the huge expenses and time required to carry out multi-stage clinical trials. It is common for few leads to go through the clinical phase, largely due to the lack of information from pharmacokinetic assays that do not understand the action of the drug on the organism. Radiotracers play a unique role in the research and development of new drugs by providing unequivocal information and reducing the total time required.

Objetivo (s)

Evaluate the use of radiotracers and related techniques in the drug discovery and development process against tropical protozoa diseases.

Material e Métodos

VOSviewer software was used for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks, to analyze the trends in the use of radiotracers in the preclinical phases of the drug development.

Resultados e Conclusão

Radiotracers were mainly applied in preclinical studies for malaria, leishmaniasis, Chagas disease, giardiasis, and toxoplasmosis, among other diseases; all uses were performed in studies such as parasite inhibition test, biodistribution profile, evaluation of drug efficacy, and understanding the mechanism of action. Given the concern with protozoa diseases and the scarcity of treatments, it is of great value to find new methods for obtaining new drugs, one possibility being the use of radioisotopes, which has been a promising initiative that is on the rise for diseases of interest in public health. The role of radiolabeled molecules is very valuable in providing unequivocal proof of drug action and efficacy and, hence, increasingly used in drug discovery and drug development.