Editorial [Hot Topic:Current Antiparasitic Drug Targets and a Paradigm Shift in Discovery of New Antiparasitic Drugs and Vaccines(Guest Editor: Babu L. Tekwani)

Despite of breakthroughs in medical sciences the parasitic diseases have still remained to be the major global health problem, affecting billions and killing millions of people every year, particularly in tropical regions of the world. Emergence of more virulent strains of the pathogens has further aggravated the problem. The numbers of drugs available for treatment of the parasitic diseases are very few and development of resistance against most of the currently available drugs has further depleted this limited armamentarium. Recent availability of complete genome sequences of most of the tropical disease pathogens and the system biology efforts have accumulated the wealth of information on composition of transcriptomes, proteomes and metablomes of these pathogens. Further analyses of these have helped in identification of the genes, proteins, enzymes and receptors, which are unique to these pathogens. Availability of this knowledge has resulted in a paradigm shift in the approach for discovery of new drugs and vaccines against these parasitic diseases. This special issue of current drug targets focusing on “Current antiparasitic drug targets” has been compiled with the objective to provide the comprehensive overviews and critical analyses of the knowledge regarding some specific molecular and biochemical functions of the parasites, namely, Schistosomal transcriptomics, transcriptional and translational machinery of the apicomplexan parasites, trypanosomatids' glyoxalase pathway, the unique DNA topoisomerase 1B of the leishmania aparasite and malarial serine/threonine protein phosphatases, which can be exploited for new antiparasitic drug discovery research. Analysis of transcriptome and proteome of Leishmania donovani have been useful in discovery of novel vaccine candidates and new drug targets for visceral leishmaniasis.