New drugs for onchocerciasis
Onchocerciasis, or river blindness, is a parasitic disease of humans caused by a filarial worm. It affects over 19 million people in Africa, leading to severe skin disease and visual impairment.
The current drug therapy, ivermectin, relieves symptoms by eliminating worm progeny but does not kill the long-lived adult worms, necessitating repeated treatments over many years.
In a collaboration with Bayer AG and L’Institut de Recherche Agricole pour le Développement, Cameroon, we have shown that a drug called emodepside can kill adults of a worm infecting African cattle, which is very closely related to the human river blindness parasite.
Emodepside is already licensed for use as a wormer in dogs and cats and has recently been shown to be safe in humans and is now being tested in people with onchocerciasis in an efficacy trial led by the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative.