Inhibition of Trypanosoma cruzi growth by medical plant extracts
Introduction
Trypanosoma cruzi is the etiologic agent of Chagas disease, that affects approximately 20 million people from Southern California to Argentina and Chile [1] and this is, after malaria, the most prevalent vector-borne illness in Latin America.
All the drugs recommended for the treatment of Chagas disease have serious limitations including limited effectiveness and important drug-related side effects. There are some drugs of promise for the treatment of this disease [2], [3] but the absence of compounds with a selective cytotoxic activity against the parasite makes the search for new compounds an urgent priority.
One of the approaches of the antiparasitic chemotherapy relies on testing the biological activity of natural products [4], [5].
Extracts derived particularly from plants offer novel possibilities to obtain new compounds active against T. cruzi. In the course of a screening program for potential antiprotozoal drugs, we assessed the effect of extracts obtained from 18 plants and two fungi which are used in traditional medicine in China and the Mediterranean area, against epimastigotes of T. cruzi in axenic cultures.
Section snippets
Plant material
The botanical species assayed are detailed in Table 1. Ranunculus sceleratus, Scrophularia auriculata, Inula viscosa, Helichrysum italicum and Haplophyllum hispanicum were collected at Pinedo, Riola, Torrent, Chiva and El Vedat de Torrent (Valencia, Spain), respectively. Specimens of these plants were deposited in the herbarium of the Department of Pharmacology, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Valencia. The rest of the species were commercial samples obtained from Asia Natural Products S.A.
Results and discussion
In this work, we assessed the anti-trypanosomal activity of extracts obtained from plants and fungus commonly used in the Chinese and Mediterranean medicines. The species were tested against epimastigotes of T. cruzi in axenic cultures. Although the model used neglects the different sensitivity of the other stages of T. cruzi, it is very useful to identify active compounds against the parasite [4].
The anti-trypanosomal activities of the different extracts are summarised in Table 2. When tested
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by grants from the Ministry of Health of the Province of Buenos Aires and FEMEBA Foundation. We thank Asia Natural Products Co. for supplying some samples. The authors are grateful to Marı́a C. Abel for the language revision of the manuscript.
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