A team of researchers, including one from Surrey's Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU), has discovered a new species of drug-resistant parasitic roundworm.
"The discovery was made in a West African parasite population during a study led by Dr. Abhinaya Venkatesan, a researcher at KPU鈥檚 Applied Genomics Centre. The research was completed as part of her PhD thesis under the supervision of Dr. John Gilleard at the University of Calgary," noted the KPU release.
A key difference between the newly discovered parasite, Trichuris incognita, and the more well-known Trichuris trichiura, commonly known as whipworm, is that it does not respond well to the treatment recommended by the World Health Organization. People infected with the parasites have similar symptoms.
Whipworm has infected more than 465 million people globally and is most common in warm, tropical and subtropical regions where access to water, sanitation and hygiene is limited.
鈥淲e worked with the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, and they initially wanted to examine how effective two drugs 鈥� ivermectin and albendazole 鈥� could be against Trichuris trichiura (whipworm) when combined, which was recommended by the WHO,鈥� says Venkatesan.
The study published in found that a combination of the two drugs was effective in treating whipworm in Tanzania and Laos with a 98 per cent success rate, but only a 70 per cent success rate in C么te d鈥橧voire, "pointing to possible genetic differences in the parasite population," noted the release.
鈥淥nce they found that the treatment wasn鈥檛 working well, they collaborated with us to utilize genomics techniques to investigate potential genetic differences in the population," Venkatesan said.
After conducting tests on Trichuris eggs and whole worms found in stool samples of patients in the region, the researchers found that the parasite in C么te d鈥橧voire "was indeed genetically different from that in the other two countries."
This discovery will likely have a significant impact on the World Health Organization's treatment of the infection, noted Venkatesan.
She added that the use of anthelmintics to treat parasitic worm infections might have led to "the rise of drug resistance."
鈥淎ntimicrobial resistance is a very hot topic right now because, over the course of many decades, humankind has faced numerous bacterial, viral and parasitic infections, but has come up with few drug classes to combat them," Venkatesan said.
鈥淭he WHO is treating billions of people with the same two or three drugs, and there isn鈥檛 a lot of research on drug development itself. When few drugs are being used over the course of decades, the parasites are going to develop resistance to them.鈥�
