Four new public data collections to support drug discovery for Chagas disease

Chagas disease is a silent and slow killer. Children in poor, rural areas of Latin America are commonly bit by “kissing bugs” and infected with a parasite called Trypanosoma cruzi. During the initial infection, most children have only mild symptoms and recover without treatment. Unfortunately, in many cases the parasite is not really gone, it’s only hiding. Decades after the initial bite, people with chronic Chagas disease can develop heart diseases, heart failure, or even death as the result of long-term infection.

The World Health Organization (WHO) classifies Chagas disease as a neglected tropical disease, but Chagas disease is gaining recognition as an emerging infection in the United States. Nearly 10 million people in Latin America are infected with the parasite, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate that over 300,000 people in the U.S. are also infected. Unfortunately, there are no FDA approved treatments for Chagas disease and treatments used outside the U.S. have toxic side effects.

As part of our ongoing work to support drug discovery for neglected tropical diseases, we here at Collaborative Drug Discovery have added four compound collections to our public database to support new drug discovery for Chagas disease. These collections include:

• A high-throughput screen of over 300,000 compounds against T. cruzi conducted by the Broad Institute
• Over 500 compounds tested against T. cruzi from the published literature
• Over 700 compounds generated as part of a lead optimization program at Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi) for T. cruzi
• A collection of over 4000 compounds developed to target a parasite related to T. cruzi, Trypanosoma brucei, as part of a lead optimization program at DNDi

These datasets complement datasets already available in CDD Public for T. cruzi and the related T. brucei provided by UCSF, Northeastern University, and St. Jude’s.

For more information on how you can share data to support neglected tropical disease drug discovery, please contact us at info@collaborativedrug.com.

This blog is authored by members of the CDD Vault community. CDD Vault is a hosted drug discovery informatics platform that securely manages both private and external biological and chemical data. It provides core functionality including chemical registration, structure activity relationship, chemical inventory, and electronic lab notebook capabilities!

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