Impedance-based platform for efficient screening of drugs against schistosomiasis
Cost-effective impedance-based platform and analysis pipeline for high-throughput screening of drugs against Schistosomiasis, a neglected tropical disease, has been developed.
Schistosomiasis is a neglected tropical disease that affects over 200 million people annually. As the antischistosomal drug pipeline is currently empty, repurposing of compound libraries has become a source for accelerating drug development, which requires high-throughput and efficient screening strategies. Paolo Ravaynia et al., in collaboration with the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, developed a parallelized impedance-based platform for continuous and automated viability evaluation of schistosomula in 128 microwells during 72 h to identify hit compounds in vitro (P. Ravaynia, et al., "Real-time and automated monitoring of antischistosomal drug activity profiles for screening of compound libraries", iScience 2022, Volume 25, Issue 4, 10408). By initially screening 57 repurposed compounds against larvae, five drugs were identified, which reduced parasite viability by more than 70%. The study showed that the developed platform is a reliable tool for real-time drug screening analysis of libraries to identify new promising compounds against schistosomiasis.
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