Three Diseases at Once?

Here's a really nice paper that points out a possible way to attack three terrible parasitic diseases at the same time: Chagas disease, leishmaniasis, and sleeping sickness, all caused by related protozoan organisms. This new effort, a multicenter collaboration between labs at Novartis, York, Washington, and the Wellcome Trust labs at Glasgow, tested a large screening collection against all three organisms looking for overlap. A lead compound (GMF5343) was optimized to give GNF6702. Note that the key change was switching out the heterocyclic core; work on the side chains did the rest. GNF3849 looks like a pretty good compound, but it wasn't selective enough in mammalian cell counterscreens, whereas GNF6702 doesn't touch them at all.