Shirley Debbie-Ann, Sharma Ishrya, Warren Cirle A, Moonah Shannon
Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases, Department of Pediatrics, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, United States.
Division of Infectious Diseases & International Health, Department of Medicine, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, United States.
Front Cell Infect Microbiol. 2021 Mar 11;11:633194. doi: 10.3389/fcimb.2021.633194. eCollection 2021.
Parasitic infections contribute significantly to worldwide morbidity and mortality. Antibiotic treatment is essential for managing patients infected with these parasites since control is otherwise challenging and there are no vaccines available for prevention. However, new antimicrobial therapies are urgently needed as significant problems exist with current treatments such as drug resistance, limited options, poor efficacy, as well as toxicity. This situation is made worse by the challenges of drug discovery and development which is costly especially for non-profitable infectious diseases, time-consuming, and risky with a high failure rate. Drug repurposing which involves finding new use for existing drugs may help to more rapidly identify therapeutic candidates while drastically cutting costs of drug research and development. In this perspective article, we discuss the importance of drug repurposing, review disulfiram pharmacology, and highlight emerging data that supports repurposing disulfiram as an anti-parasitic, exemplified by the major diarrhea-causing parasite .
寄生虫感染在全球范围内对发病率和死亡率有重大影响。抗生素治疗对于管理感染这些寄生虫的患者至关重要，因为否则控制起来具有挑战性，而且没有可用的预防疫苗。然而，由于当前治疗存在诸如耐药性、选择有限、疗效不佳以及毒性等重大问题，迫切需要新的抗菌疗法。药物发现和开发面临的挑战使这种情况更加恶化，这一过程成本高昂，尤其是对于无利可图的传染病而言，耗时且风险大，失败率高。药物重新利用，即寻找现有药物的新用途，可能有助于更快地识别治疗候选药物，同时大幅降低药物研发成本。在这篇观点文章中，我们讨论了药物重新利用的重要性，回顾了双硫仑的药理学，并强调了支持将双硫仑重新用作抗寄生虫药物的新数据，以主要引起腹泻的寄生虫为例。
