Need for sustainable approaches in antileishmanial drug discovery

Leishmaniasis is a neglected parasitic disease for which the current antileishmania therapeutics are hampered by drug toxicity, high cost, need for parenteral administration, increasing treatment failure rates, and emergence of drug resistance. The R&D pipeline had run fairly dry for several years, but fortunately some new drug candidates are now under (pre)clinical development. Identification of novel drugs will nevertheless remain essential to adequately sustain and improve effective disease control in the future. In this review, a package of standard and accessible R&D approaches is discussed with expansion to some alternative strategies focusing on parasite-host and vector-host interactions.