Leishmaniasis and glycosaminoglycans: a future therapeutic strategy?

Leishmania spp. depend on effective macrophage infection to establish and develop in mammalian hosts. Both metacyclic promastigotes and amastigotes are able to infect host cells, and thus they rely on several ligands that, when recognized by macrophage receptors, mediate parasite uptake. During macrophage primary infection with metacyclic forms from the insect vector and during amastigote dissemination via macrophage rupture, both infective stages have to cope with the host extracellular microenvironment, including extracellular matrix molecules. Glycosaminoglycans are abundant in the extracellular matrix and many of these molecules are able to interact with the parasite and the host cell, mediating positive and negative effects for the infection, depending on their structure and/or location. In addition, glycosaminoglycans are present at the surface of macrophages as proteoglycans, playing important roles for parasite recognition and uptake. In this review, we discuss glycosaminoglycans in the context of Leishmania infection as well as the possible applications of the current knowledge regarding these molecules for the development of new therapeutic strategies to control parasite dissemination.