Bioguided Design of Trypanosomicidal Compounds: A Successful Strategy in Drug Discovery

Drug development is a long and expensive process that takes about 15 years and is mostly carried out by the pharmaceutical industry. In the case of the diseases produced by trypanosomatids, this development is poorly performed by the pharmaceutical industry. As a result the academia is the one that take a leading role with the drug development process. More effective and economic methodologies to obtain safe compounds and with strong trypanosomicidal activity are urgently needed. In this work, a series of methods are described to obtain bioactive molecules with antiparasitic activity and good pharmacological profiles.