This includes strongyloidiasis, an intestinal roundworm infection that affects an estimated 30 to 100 million people worldwide.Īnother example is amphotericin B, originally approved to treat human yeast and mold infections. In the years since it was approved to treat river blindness, ivermectin was also shown to be highly effective against other parasitic infections. Drug repurposing is attractive because the approval process can happen more quickly and at a lower cost since nearly all of the basic research has already been completed. Infectious disease researchers frequently attempt to repurpose antimicrobials and other medications to treat infections. Bengt Nyman/Wikimedia Commons Repurposing drugs for other uses Satoshi Omura and William Campbell were awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their research on ivermectin. It’s these efforts that were recognized by the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded to both William Campbell and Satoshi Omura for their leadership on this groundbreaking research. These two decades of extensive work to discover, develop and distribute ivermectin helped to significantly reduce human suffering from river blindness. Thanks to ivermectin, river blindness has been essentially eliminated in 11 Latin American countries, preventing approximately 600,000 cases of blindness.
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It has since been distributed free of charge through the Mectizan Donation Program to dozens of countries. Ivermectin underwent trials to treat river blindness in 1982 and was approved in 1987. It is transmitted to humans from blackflies carrying the parasitic worm Onchocerca volvulus and occurs predominantly in Africa.
River blindness, also known as onchocerciasis, is the second leading cause of preventable blindness in the world. Pak Sang Lee/flickr, CC BY-NC Developing ivermectin for human useĮarly experiments by William Campbell and his team from Merck discovered that the drug also worked against a human parasite that causes an infection called river blindness. The chemical compounds that make up ivermectin were first discovered in bacteria found in the soil of a Japanese golf course. It was approved in 1981 for commercial use in veterinary medicine for parasitic infections in livestock and domestic pets with the brand name Mectizan.
Soon, Merck and the Kitasato Institute developed a less toxic form they named ivermectin. Research on avermectin continued for approximately five years. To my knowledge, avermectin has yet to be found in any other soil sample in the world. Satoshi Omura and his team isolated a group of chemicals called avermectin from bacteria found in a single soil sample near a Japanese golf course.
Merck partnered with the Kitasato Institute, a medical research facility in Japan. All of these infectious organisms are quite different from viruses. Common parasites include nematodes, such as flatworms and roundworms, and arthropods, such as fleas and lice. Researchers focused on discovering chemicals that could potentially treat parasitic infections in animals. Ivermectin was first identified in the 1970s during a veterinary drug screening project at Merck Pharmaceuticals.
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