Treatment of them, that is.
Malaria and river blindness were targeted by new drugs, thanks to this work.
Nobel in medicine goes to parasites
Malaria and river blindness were targeted by new drugs, thanks to this work.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ars Technica
We have successfully developed vaccines for many viruses and bacteria, and antibiotic and antiviral drugs can often be used to effectively treat infected individuals. But parasite infections pose significant challenges to traditional treatment approaches. This year's Nobel Prize in Medicine has gone to researchers who created treatments for some of humanity's biggest scourges: river blindness, as well as other nematode diseases, and malaria.
The award for development of ivermectin as a nematode treatment is shared by Satoshi Omura and William Campbell. They share the prize with Youyou Tu, who isolated artemisinin and demonstrated its effectiveness against malaria.
Treatments for viruses and bacteria are simple in principle. It's possible to design or discover drug molecules that latch on to their proteins, keeping them from functioning normally. Since billions of years of evolution have made these organisms biologically distinct from their human hosts, these chemicals will generally not target the equivalent human proteins. Thus, while the disease-causing organism is killed, the human host is largely unaffected by these drugs. That's the principle behind antibiotics and antivirals.
An alternative approach is to develop a vaccine. This primes the immune system to produce antibodies against the virus or bacterial cell, which allows the immune system to target and destroy these invaders.
Neither of these approaches is especially effective against more complex parasites, such as nematode worms or the malarial parasite. Worms are large, complex organisms, and they can't be attacked effectively by the immune system, leaving vaccines impotent. The malarial parasite could potentially be targeted by a vaccine (and several are undergoing testing), but it's well adapted to the human immune system—its genome encodes thousands of proteins that it constantly shifts among in order to distract the immune system.
Creating drugs that specifically target these organisms is a challenge as well. ...
The award for development of ivermectin as a nematode treatment is shared by Satoshi Omura and William Campbell. They share the prize with Youyou Tu, who isolated artemisinin and demonstrated its effectiveness against malaria.
Treatments for viruses and bacteria are simple in principle. It's possible to design or discover drug molecules that latch on to their proteins, keeping them from functioning normally. Since billions of years of evolution have made these organisms biologically distinct from their human hosts, these chemicals will generally not target the equivalent human proteins. Thus, while the disease-causing organism is killed, the human host is largely unaffected by these drugs. That's the principle behind antibiotics and antivirals.
An alternative approach is to develop a vaccine. This primes the immune system to produce antibodies against the virus or bacterial cell, which allows the immune system to target and destroy these invaders.
Neither of these approaches is especially effective against more complex parasites, such as nematode worms or the malarial parasite. Worms are large, complex organisms, and they can't be attacked effectively by the immune system, leaving vaccines impotent. The malarial parasite could potentially be targeted by a vaccine (and several are undergoing testing), but it's well adapted to the human immune system—its genome encodes thousands of proteins that it constantly shifts among in order to distract the immune system.
Creating drugs that specifically target these organisms is a challenge as well. ...
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