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African trypanosomiasis or "African sleeping sickness" remains one of the world's most neglected diseases. ~60 million people are at risk & ~5,000 new cases are reported annually in sub-Saharan Africa.

 

The disease is uniformly fatal if untreated. Available treatments are highly toxic and/or difficult to administer, & no vaccines currently exist. There is, therefore, an urgent need for the identification of novel therapies

 

Unfortunately, there is no economic incentive from big Pharma to invest in the development of new drugs. Much hope relies on basic biomedical science research to understand the complex pattern of these infections.  

 

The causative agent is T. brucei - a single-celled flagellated protozoan parasite that lives and multiplies in the blood of infected mammals. We can culture parasites both in vivo and in vitro in the lab. 

 

The availability of molecular and experimental tools: targeted gene disruption, epitope-tagging, constitutive & conditional overexpression, conditional RNA silencing,  make T. brucei a powerful "model" system to study both evolutionarily "divergent" and evolutionarily "conserved" biological processes