The last step of this research work is marked by the presentation of the Ofelia Magdalena Córdova Paz Soldán´s thesis, who has studied proteins capable of mixing fatty acids in the Trypanosoma cruzi, the parasite responsible for the Chagas disease. Such disease is incurable at present, and there are only medicined for the first stage of the disease. However, in the chronic phase a series of painful ailments such as arrhithmia, heart disease or colon inflammation follow one another.
It has been estimated that 16 to 18 million persons get infected by the Chagas disease. 50,000 of them will die every year. The main natural way of contagion is through a sort of bedbug, carrier of the Trypanosoma cruzi, besides placental or mother to child transmission. “Such insects live in unhealthy areas, and that is why they are so plentiful in some jungle areas of Latin America with houses made of adobe and palm”, Osuna points out.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has set in motion a program to eradicate the infection of the Chagas disease through such bedbugs known as kissing bugs, “because people do not usually notice when they are bitten in lips or eyelids”. They do not get infected through the bite, but the faeces that they leave in the infected person. Thay carry the parasite, which can not be found in Africa or Europe, and, thanks to the WHO´s program and despite numerous dfificulties, it is being eradicated in some countries of Latin America.
A definitive remedy
However, there is not a vaccine or medicines for the last phase, when the most serious symptoms appear. An effective and definitive remedy is more necessary if we take into account that most of the infected are children when the disease still has not external symptoms. In addition, the parasite can stay alive in foods like cane juice, very consumes in Latin America; there have been infection cases through such an inusual way.
Córdoba Paz Soldán´s research work, a scientist of the University of Trujillo who has prepared her doctoral thesis in the UGR supervised by Antonio Osuna, could lay the foundations for a DNA vaccine, with the genes that codify certain proteinas which carry the necessary fatty acids for the parasite´s normal metabolism. Thus, the individual´s cells could synthesize such proteins, which could act making Trypanosoma cruz´s survival impossible, both in case of natural infection and through blood transfusion.
As it has been revealed in the papers published by scientific journals Infection and Inmunity and The Journal of Parasitology, such proteins could be an antigene given the non-existence of inmunological reactions crossed with other infectious diseases of the area. Immunization by these proteins can be an alternative for an effective vaccination, as well as for the study of transport and way of action of future drugs.
Reference:
Prof. Antonio Osuna Carrillo de Albornoz.
Institute of Biothecnology.
Phone number: 958243263 – 958243857.
E-mail: aosuna@ugr.es
