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Decoding anti-leishmanial drug efficacy determinants.

After a couple of months on BioRxiv our first pre-print has been accepted for publication in Antimicrobial Agents & Chemotherapy!
‘Chemogenomic profiling of anti-leishmanial efficacy and resistance in the related kinetoplastid parasite Trypanosoma brucei’
Selecting our T. brucei RNAi library in the anti-HAT drugs revolutionised our understanding…

Amino acid transport and drug efficacy

Back in 2012, we published our study decoding the anti-T. brucei drug efficacy determinants – or parasite proteins critical to drug action, such as drug transporters and activators. This identified a slew of proteins that drive the action of the five anti-HAT drugs. More recently, we’ve been following…

Ubiquitination influences suramin efficacy

Suramin is one of the oldest drugs still in use today – it’s been used to treat early stage human African trypanosomiasis caused by T. b. rhodesiense since the early 1920s. Back in 2012 we showed that suramin uptake was dependent on receptor mediated endocytosis and relied on a complex…

Why Trypanosoma brucei is sensitive to human serum

Cathepsin-L can resist lysis by human serum in Trypanosoma brucei brucei.
PLoS Pathogens 10: e1004130
Featured at: LSHTM, Wellcome Trust
See also: commentary in Microbial Cell 1:270-2

Most African trypanosomes, including the veterinary species Trypanosoma brucei brucei and T. congolense (causative agents of the wasting disease nagana…

Opinion piece published in Trends in Parasitology…

Receptor mediated endocytosis for drug delivery in African trypanosomes: fulfilling Paul Ehrlich’s vision of chemotherapy
(featured on the front cover of the May 2013 edition of Trends in Parasitology)

A lot of time is spent identifying candidate drug targets and then designing inhibitors to block their function in the…

Review published in ‘Parasitology’…

Genetic dissection of drug resistance in trypanosomes | Full Text
Part of a special edition of Parasitology, 140(12):  Genetic and genomic approaches to understanding drug resistance in parasites (October, 2013).

Our understanding of the routes to drug resistance in trypanosomes, as well as our ability to dissect the modes of…

Latest work on histone chaperones and VSG ES regulation published in Nucleic Acids Research.

Cell-cycle-regulated control of VSG expression site silencing by histones and histone chaperones ASF1A and CAF-1b in Trypanosoma brucei. Nucleic Acids Res. (PubMed | PDF)

A longstanding mystery in T. brucei biology is how these parasites are able to express a single variant surface glycoprotein (VSG) from a single…