The Drugs of Sleeping Sickness: Their Mechanisms of Action and Resistance, and a Brief History

Abstract

With the incidence of sleeping sickness in decline and genuine progress being made towards the WHO goal of eliminating sleeping sickness as a major public health concern, this is a good moment to evaluate the drugs that ‘got the job done’: their development, their limitations and the resistance that the parasites developed against them. This retrospective looks back on the remarkable story of chemotherapy against trypanosomiasis, a story that goes back to the very origins and conception of chemotherapy in the first years of the 20 century and is still not finished today.

Keywords

• sleeping sickness
• human african trypanosomiasis
• trypanosoma brucei
• drugs
• drug resistance
• history