Prof. PASCAL MARCHAND Cibles et médicaments des infections et de l’immunité, IICiMed Nantes Université will give a lecture entitled “Exploring casein kinase 1 as a novel target to combat leishmaniasis”.

Abstract:

According to a recent WHO report, leishmaniasis affects nearly 12 million people, with 350 million others at risk, and is responsible for nearly 40,000 deaths per year. In 2012, mainly due to global warming, visceral leishmaniasis (VL) was declared as a new emerging disease in Europe. Today, there is no effective vaccine, and the limited treatments are unfortunately too toxic and costly. In this context, there is a real emergency to develop new paradigms for antileishmanial therapy, which also limit the devastating impact of parasite

resistance. While most of the current drugs as well as those in development target the parasite biology, we propose to target the exoproteome of Leishmania, and particularly excreted signalling kinases, to inhibit host-parasite interactions, which will restore the host cell ability to fight the parasite and limit the risk of resistance. To this end, we selected and validated Leishmania casein Kinase I paralog 2 (L-CK1.2 or LmCK1) as a drug target.2,3 We also reported the discovery of CTN1122, an imidazo[1,2-a]pyrazine derivative and analogues with promising antileishmanial properties that target L-CK1.2.

When:

Thursday 29th January, at 2.00PM

Where:

Sala del Consiglio, building C11, Department of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences