The University of Glasgow has received funding to repurpose drugs that are currently used to treat some parasitic diseases in humans – Sleeping Sickness, Chagas Disease and Leishmaniasis – to manage amoebic gill disease in Atlantic salmon.
The University of Glasgow has received funding to repurpose drugs that are currently used to treat some parasitic diseases in humans – Sleeping Sickness, Chagas Disease and Leishmaniasis – to manage amoebic gill disease in Atlantic salmon.
Researchers hope that opening new markets for these drugs in the developed world will also help to drive down their costs in the developing world, where unaffordable healthcare can lead to many unnecessary deaths.
Neoparamoeba perurans causes amoebic gill disease (AGD) in marine phase Atlantic Salmon and is a major pathogen in salmonid aquaculture, with annual associated losses rapidly approaching those caused by sea lice. N. perurans has a unique biology that can readily exploited with tools available at the University of Glasgow.
Enclosed within the N. perurans cell is another organism called Perkinsela. Perkinsela which is a symbiont – an organism that benefits its host cell. Genome sequencing indicates that Perkinsela is closely related to a group of organisms that cause diseases in humans and domestic livestock called trypansomatids.
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Image via University of Glasgow.
