Kala- Azar and Nanomedicine

Subject: Science and tech

Context:

Scientists from the Institute of Nano Science & Technology (INST), Mohali, an autonomous institute of the Department of Science & Technology have developed an oral nanomedicine for combating visceral leishmaniasis.

Concept:

• Leishmaniasis is a disease caused by any species of Leishmania parasite.
• It is transmitted by the bite of an infected female sandfly. I
• In most cases, a person who is infected by the parasite has neither symptoms nor signs of infection and is not considered to have leishmaniasis.
• Although there are some 20 different parasites that cause the disease, there are only three different types of leishmaniasis.
• The most common type (CL) causes skin lesions, mainly nodules or painless ulcers.
• The second type (VL, also known as kala-azar) is a life-threatening disease that causes anaemia (deficiency in the number or quality of red blood cells), fever, enlarged liver, enlarged spleen and significant weight loss.
• The third type (MCL, or mucosal leishmaniasis alone) destroys the mucous membranes of the nose, mouth and throat cavities and surrounding tissues.
• It is one of the most neglected tropical diseases and around 95 % of cases are reported from Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Nepal, Somalia, South Sudan, and Sudan.

Nano-medicine

• Nanomedicine is the application of nanotechnology(the engineering of tiny machines) to the prevention and treatment of disease in the human body.
• It uses the properties developed by a material at its nanometric scale 10^-9 m which often differ in terms of physics, chemistry or biology from the same material at a bigger scale.
• Moreover, the nanometric size is also the scale of many biological mechanisms in the human body allowing nanoparticles and nanomaterials to potentially cross natural barriers to access new sites of delivery and to interact with DNA or small proteins at different levels, in blood or within organs, tissues or cells.
• At the nano-scale, the surface-to-volume ratio is such that the surface properties are becoming an intrinsic parameter of the potential actions of a particle or material.
• Coating of the particles and functionalization of their surfaces are in this way extremely common to increase the biocompatibility of the particle and its circulation time in the blood, as well as to ensure a highly selective binding to the desired target.
• Nanomedicine has the potential to enable early detection and prevention and to drastically improve diagnosis, treatment and follow-up of many diseases including cancer.