Natural products active against African trypanosomes: a step towards new drugs Sara Hoet,* a Frederik Opperdoes, b Reto Brun c and Joëlle Quetin-Leclercq a a Laboratoire de Pharmacognosie, Unité d’Analyse Chimique et Physico-Chimique des Médicaments, Université Catholique de Louvain, UCL 72.30-CHAM, Av. E. Mounier 72, 1200 Brussels, Belgium. E-mail: [email protected] b Research Unit for Tropical Diseases, Christian de Duve Institute of Cellular Pathology and Laboratory of Biochemistry, Université Catholique de Louvain, Av. Hippocrate 74–75, 1200 Brussels, Belgium c Medical Parasitology and Infection Biology, Parasite Chemotherapy, Swiss Tropical Institute, Socinstrasse 57, CH-4002 Basel, Switzerland Received (in Cambridge, UK) 9th September 2003 First published as an Advance Article on the web 5th May 2004 Covering: mid-1980s up to June 2003 This review covers compounds with activity on African trypanosomes (mainly Trypanosoma brucei subsp., T. congolense and T. vivax) isolated from natural sources and is organized according to the structure of the metabolites (alkaloids, phenolic derivatives, quinones, terpenes and other metabolites). The literature from the mid-1980s up to June 2003 is reviewed and 89 references are cited. Sara Hoet was born in Lima, Peru in 1976. She obtained her Masters in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium) in 1999. Since 2000, she has been pursuing her PhD studies at the Université Catholique de Louvain in the laboratory of pharmacognosy headed by Prof. J. Quetin-Leclercq as a research fellow of the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research. As part of her PhD research, she is analysing the composition of African plants which are traditionally used to treat sleeping sickness with the aim of isolating the active principles. Fred Opperdoes (58) is full professor of biochemistry at the Catholic University of Louvain and member of the directorate of the Christian de Duve Institute of Cellular Pathology. His main interest is carbohydrate metabolism of the Trypanosomatidae as a potential target for drug development and he has published over 150 papers in this area. Reto Brun received his PhD in Biology in 1973 from the University of Basel. From 1974 to 1976 he was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California at Irvine in the lab of Prof. Stuart M. Krassner working on transformation processes of Leishmania. During the following 20 years he studied various aspects of African trypanosomes at the Swiss Tropical Institute (STI) in Basel and during many short stays as a visiting scientist in Africa. The development of in vitro assays for trypanosomes and other protozoan parasites offered the possibility of doing drug discovery work for tropical diseases. Today Reto Brun is head of the Parasite Chemotherapy Unit at STI and professor for biology at the University of Basel. His lab is a reference screening center for TDR/WHO Drug Discovery Research and also for the Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV) Foundation. His research interests are drug discovery and development work for malaria and African sleeping sickness and the control of the latter disease in collaboration with African national institutions. Joëlle Quetin-Leclercq is a pharmacist and received her PhD in pharmaceutical sciences in 1989 from the University of Liege where she mainly worked on alkaloids from Strychnos. She moved to the Université Catholique de Louvain in 1995 where she is now professor of pharmacognosy and drug analysis, director of the laboratory of pharmacognosy and head of the analytical chemistry and drug analysis unit. Her main research interests deal with plants used in African traditional medicine: analysis of their activity, isolation and structure determination of their active molecules, quantification in plants or crude extracts and quality control, in collaboration with several African partners. Sara Hoet Fred Opperdoes Reto Brun Joëlle Quetin-Leclercq DOI: 10.1039/ b311021b 353 This journal is © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2004 Nat. Prod. Rep. , 2004, 21, 353–364
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