“A pill for sleeping sickness that can cure the disease with a single dose has been approved by EU regulators and could be deployed in endemic countries as soon as next year. It’s far easier to administer than the current standard 10-day regimen and could make it much easier to treat patients in remote areas,” reports The Doomslayer.
NPR reports:
Sleeping sickness is a notorious disease — immortalized in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. A single bite from a tsetse fly carrying the parasite is all it takes to infect someone. Without treatment one form of the illness can progress from mild symptoms to death in a matter of weeks.
Now, a new drug holds the promise of helping the World Health Organization meet its goal of eliminating the disease by 2030. A committee of the European Medicines Agency has given an important green light to the first single-dose treatment — a medication called acoziborole, which could be in use by early next year.
Acoziborole is especially notable because it is taken as three pills swallowed together in a single dose, replacing long-used earlier treatments that included intravenous drugs known to cause a ‘burning’ sensation in the veins as well as being fatal for nearly one in 20 patients. Even the current first-line oral treatment, fexinidazole, must be taken for 10 days and comes with severe side effects such as nausea, vomiting and heart-rhythm disturbances. By contrast, clinical trials of acoziborole found just one significant side effect: mild to moderate headache.
‘For decades, available treatments were difficult to use,’ says Dr. Gerardo Priotto, who leads the World Health Organization’s efforts against sleeping sickness and was not part of the new drug’s development team. Therapies required staff, equipment and reliable infrastructure, he says. ‘These challenges were especially severe in remote, rural areas, where most cases occur and health services are limited.’
The new drug, acoziborole, removes just about all of these barriers.
Chad, a very poor country that used to be the most backward nation on Earth, recently eliminated sleeping sickness, an accomplishment for a country that was “swamped by civil wars” for much of its history. But sleeping sickness continues to be present in many other African countries, especially the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Sleeping sickness is an awful disease that begins with fever and aches. Then things get worse. The parasite that causes the disease will disrupt sleeping patterns and cause aggressiveness and psychosis. The death rate from sleeping sickness is close to 100%, if left untreated.
The customary treatment for sleeping sickness was also quite awful: a drug that is toxic to the kidneys, followed by an arsenic-based drug that’s toxic to the brain. The treatment killed up to a tenth of all patients. For many years, therapy would begin with a lumbar puncture to see if the parasite has invaded the central nervous system, followed by injections of a drug that damages your kidneys, followed by an arsenic-based drug that harms your brain.
But in 2024, European regulators approved a 10-day course of pills that cured sleeping sickness in 97% of patients.
And now, this new drug gets rid of sleeping sickness with a single pill.
