Money for sleeping sickness study

African sleeping sickness is caused by a parasite spread by tsetse fly bites

Scottish scientists have been given £1.7m to develop new ways of fighting a tropical disease which kills at least 50,000 people each year.

African sleeping sickness is caused by a parasite which is spread through the bite of the tsetse fly.

The new money from the Wellcome Trust will be used to study how the parasite builds its surface coat, which protects it from the victim's immune system.

The work will be carried out by Dundee University researchers.

'Extremely poisonous'

Professor Mike Ferguson, one of the team carrying out the research, said: "The problem really starts when the parasite gets into the brain where it causes character disintegration, coma and death in that order and it's invariably fatal if not treated.

"One of the big problems is that the current therapeutics which are available are extremely difficult to administer, pretty expensive and actually extremely poisonous in their own right.

"The frontline drug - melarsoprol - kills about 1 in 20 patients that it is administered to."

If the scientists can figure out how the parasite builds it coat they may be able to devise new ways of attacking it.

Prof Ferguson said: "There is very little interest in diseases like African sleeping sickness within the pharmaceutical industry, primarily because there is not likely to be much money in finding and developing a cure for the very poor.

"That is why we established our unit here, so that we can identify drug targets and test them thoroughly and hopefully find new drugs which can help us get rid of these terribly debilitating diseases."