Chemotherapy parasitic worms

Rodriguez, E., Gavin, J. C., and West, J. E. (1982). The possible role of Amazonian psychoactive plants in the chemotherapy of parasitic worms a hypothesis. Journal of Ethnopharmacology 6,303-309. 

The use of drugs to eradicate micro-organisms and parasitic worms in the body is called chemotherapy. Drugs that are used to treat infections with micro-organisms are known as antimicrobial drugs or antibiotics. The first antibiotics were naturally produced by micro-organisms nowadays many are produced synthetically. Infestations with parasitic worms are treated with drugs called antihelmintics. 

Mansour, T. E. (1979) Chemotherapy of parasitic worms new biochemical strategies. Science 205 462-469. 

The only internationally used drug effective for treating schistosomiasis is praziquantel. This drug induces a rapid influx into the worms of surrounding Ca2+, a process that leads to paralysis (Martin, 1997), and changes in the surface membrane architecture that lead to the exposure of worm antigens that are normally cryptic (Brindley and Sher, 1987). Parasites affected in this way become susceptible to antibody-mediated immune attack and are killed as a result of the synergistic actions of chemotherapy and the immune response (Doenhoff et al., 1987 Brindley etal., 1989). 

As early as 1940 s nitrofurans caught attention by virtue of their good antibacterial activity. Exploitation of this lead in helminth chemotherapy showed that nitroheterocycles may be useful in the treatment of various worm infections in different hosts including humans. Consequently, various laboratories set out to search for new anthelmintic drugs derived from nitroheterocycles and nitroaryls, opening one of the fascinating chapters in the chemotherapy of parasitic diseases. 

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