Combatting Tropical diseases: a multi-level approach

Tropical diseases affect over 2 billion people and claim nearly 2 million lives every year including children, worldwide. The broad group of communicable diseases is mainly prevalent in the developing world with tropical and subtropical climates. With limited healthcare services, constant contact with disease vectors or reservoirs, and inadequate sanitation, these tropical diseases have become a persistent burden on the economies of the countries. Even though proper health measures have been considered with preventive chemotherapy and disease management, the diseases still prevail with frequent relapses every year. Currently, there are drugs in clinical trials and available in the market that can treat the diseases, however, the drugs come with severe side effects or are unaffordable. Along with these, there is an impending threat of drug resistance that can cripple the elimination efforts. Therefore, it is high time that researchers focus on developing better therapeutics that can overcome the diseases and put an end to the malady once and for all.

Considering the current scenario, there is an urgent need to identify and develop new therapeutics against tropical diseases. The goal of this special issue is to bring together studies that will address the identification, design, and validation of different therapeutics against tropical diseases. Articles should be focused on tackling tropical diseases of bacterial, fungal, or viral origins. Various topics, but not limited to, drug identification, validation, pharmacokinetics, and protein/peptide therapeutics along with attention to drug resistance in tropical diseases will be accommodated in this issue. To further widen the reader’s knowledge of different approaches available today for therapeutic development, the issue will contain studies involving in silico tools, in vitro, and in vivo methods, applied both individually as well as in a multi-angle approach.

The scope of the special issue includes

• Drug identification, design, and validation against tropical diseases.

• Metabolism and pharmacokinetics of drugs against tropical diseases.

• Drug resistance in tropical diseases.

• Peptide/protein therapeutics including vaccines and passive antibody treatment against tropical diseases.

The articles should address the issues specifically using in silico, in vitro, or in vivo methods. The special issue will accommodate research articles, case studies, short communication, and compelling review articles on the sub-themes. Articles that discuss tropical diseases referred to in WHO guidelines will only be considered.