Match-making for posaconazole through systems thinking.

Currently available drugs for Chagas' disease are limited by toxicity and low efficacy in the chronic stage. Posaconazole, the most advanced new anti-chagasic drug candidate, did not fully confirm its initial potential in a Phase II clinical trial for chronic Chagas' disease. Given that posaconazole is highly active against Trypanosoma cruzi in vitro, and was very well tolerated in clinical trials, it should not be abandoned. Rather, a combination therapy may provide a highly promising outlook. Systems-scale approaches facilitate the hunt for a combination partner for posaconazole, which acts by blocking sterol biosynthesis. Mounting evidence suggests the functional interactions between sterols and sphingolipids in vivo. Here, we propose combining sterol and sphingolipid biosynthesis inhibitors to advance drug development in Chagas' disease.

Genome profiling of sterol synthesis shows convergent evolution in parasites and guides chemotherapeutic attack.

Sterols are an essential class of lipids in eukaryotes, where they serve as structural components of membranes and play important roles as signaling molecules. Sterols are also of high pharmacological significance: cholesterol-lowering drugs are blockbusters in human health, and inhibitors of ergosterol biosynthesis are widely used as antifungals. Inhibitors of ergosterol synthesis are also being developed for Chagas's disease, caused by Trypanosoma cruzi. Here we develop an in silico pipeline to globally evaluate sterol metabolism and perform comparative genomics. We generate a library of hidden Markov model-based profiles for 42 sterol biosynthetic enzymes, which allows expressing the genomic makeup of a given species as a numerical vector. Hierarchical clustering of these vectors functionally groups eukaryote proteomes and reveals convergent evolution, in particular metabolic reduction in obligate endoparasites. We experimentally explore sterol metabolism by testing a set of sterol biosynthesis inhibitors against trypanosomatids, Plasmodium falciparum, Giardia, and mammalian cells, and by quantifying the expression levels of sterol biosynthetic genes during the different life stages of T. cruzi and Trypanosoma brucei. The phenotypic data correlate with genomic makeup for simvastatin, which showed activity against trypanosomatids. Other findings, such as the activity of terbinafine against Giardia, are not in agreement with the genotypic profile.

Probing the antimalarial mechanism of artemisinin and OZ277 (arterolane) with nonperoxidic isosteres and nitroxyl radicals.

Peroxidic antimalarials such as the semisynthetic artemisinins are critically important in the treatment of drug-resistant malaria. Nevertheless, their peroxide bond-dependent mode of action is still not well understood. Using combination experiments with cultured Plasmodium falciparum cells, we investigated the interactions of the nitroxide radical spin trap, 2,2,6,6-tetramethyl-1-piperidinyloxy (TEMPO), and four of its analogs with artemisinin and the ozonide drug development candidate OZ277. The antagonism observed for combinations of artemisinin or OZ277 with the TEMPO analogs supports the hypothesis that the formation of carbon-centered radicals is critical for the activity of these two antimalarial peroxides. The TEMPO analogs showed a trend toward greater antagonism with artemisinin than they did with OZ277, an observation that can be explained by the greater tendency of artemisinin-derived carbon-centered radicals to undergo internal self-quenching reactions, resulting in a lower proportion of radicals available for subsequent chemical reactions such as the alkylation of heme and parasite proteins. In a further mechanistic experiment, we tested both artemisinin and OZ277 in combination with their nonperoxidic analogs. The latter had no effect on the antimalarial activities of the former. These data indicate that the antimalarial properties of peroxides do not derive from reversible interactions with parasite targets.