This model is found nowhere else in the world and is used to evaluate the response of sleeping sickness to various regimes of anti trypanosomal compounds. Immtech International Inc. The consortium, says another Ketri investigator Raymond Mdachi, was brought together specifically to address basic research, drug design and pre-clinical and clinical trials of drugs to treat trypanosomosis and leishmaniasis. Leishmaniasis is caused by a parasite that can live in people, dogs and rodents. Spread by the bites of tiny sand flies, the disease causes lesions, severe disfigurement and when the parasites invade internal organs, death. African sleeping sickness, spreads among people bitten by the tsetse fly.
Symptoms begin with low fever, pain in the joints and itchy skin.
Eventually the parasites carrying the disease enter the brain and then hallucinations and unpredictable behaviour is common. Victims experience excruciating pain and eventually lapses into a coma before dying. The investigators say Ketri's role will include evaluation of toxicity of the selected compounds in the velvet monkey model. It will also evaluate promising lead compounds for in vitro and in vivo activity against drug resistant isolates, including diamidine resistant isolates in the vervet monkey model of chronic t.b. rhodesiense infection. According to Dr Ndungu, it is proposed that two to three compounds that show improved activities and reduced host toxicity will be tested in the monkey model each study year.