Drug clears sleeping sickness parasite from the body in clinical trial

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Sleeping sickness can be treated with a single pill. The people with this stage of sleeping sickness who received the experimental treatment did not have the parasites 18 months later.

The drug was effective in clearing the parasites when it was already in the brain.

Sleeping sickness is a disease that is endemic to West and central Africa. Fifty million people were at risk between 2016 and 2020 and 3 million were at moderate or higher risk.

The condition can be spread via tsetse flies, which can pick up the parasites when consuming the blood of a mammal. There are early symptoms like weakness and itching. The infection can quickly become fatal if it is not treated quickly.

fexinidazole is a drug that is used to treat infections. Fexinidazole must be taken once a day for 10 days with food in order to remove the parasites. It has a number of side effects. The European Medicines Agency says that fexinidazole needs to be taken under medical supervision.

Anthoine Tarral at the Center for Neglected Diseases in Switzerland and his colleagues analysed over 200 people over the age of 15 to find out if a one-off drug called acoziborole could be used to treat neglected diseases. The participants were diagnosed with sleeping sickness.

More than three-quarters of the participants were given acoziborole while in a late stage of the sleeping sickness parasites being in their brain, suggesting that the infections may have reached their brain.

The parasites were in other bodily fluids, but not the brain. For 18 months, all participants were followed.

Tarral says that there weren't many people who had been diagnosed with sleeping sickness in the study area. He says that the sample size in each treatment group would not be large enough to give a meaningful comparison.

Acoziborole had a 95 percent success rate among participants with late-stage sleeping sickness. Among those with an early to intermediate infection, this rose to 100 percent. The researchers didn't know when the parasites were gone from the participants' bodies.

The parasites can enter the central nervous system if not treated correctly.

The World Health Organization wants to eliminate the transmission of a form of sleeping sickness by the year 2030.

He believes that the drug can change the world. Tarral said that Acoziborole could be available in two years.

There were a few mild to moderate side effects. 13 of the participants vomited. It's not clear if this was a result of the drug or an unrelated factor.

The findings show acoziborole to be a safe, effective, oral therapy for the treatment of human African Trypanosomiasis.

The goal of the WHO is to interrupt disease transmission by 2030 and the challenges here must not be underestimated, but the improvements that acozile offers over current alternative therapies could prove pivotal in helping to reach this goal.

The journal's title is The Lancet Infectious Diseases.