Metal-based drugs for malaria, trypanosomiasis and leishmaniasis: recent achievements and perspectives

Tropical diseases today constitute a major health problem and a big challenge for drug discovery. Because of the limited arsenal of effective antiparasitic agents and the frequent appearance of chemoresistance, there is an urgent and continuous need to develop new drugs against these ailments. Metal compounds still offer excellent opportunities to find new ‘leads’ against the major protozoan diseases such as malaria, leishmaniasis and trypanosomiasis. A few metal-based drugs are already available in this therapeutic area, and others are currently being developed. Recent progress in parasite genomics and the identification of a few biomolecular targets hold great promise for the discovery of new ‘mechanism-based’ antiparasitic metallodrugs. The trends and perspectives for this exciting research field are outlined here.