Identification of Three Classes of Heteroaromatic Compounds with Activity against Intracellular Trypanosoma cruzi by Chemical Library Screening
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The development of new drugs against Chagas disease is a priority since the currently available medicines have toxic effects, partial efficacy and are targeted against the acute phase of disease. At present, there is no drug to treat the chronic stage. In this study, we have optimized a whole cell-based assay for high throughput screening of compounds that inhibit infection of mammalian cells by Trypanosoma cruzi trypomastigotes. A 2000-compound chemical library was screened using a recombinant T. cruzi (Tulahuen strain) expressing beta-galactosidase. Three hits were selected for their high activity against T. cruzi and low toxicity to host cells in vitro: PCH1, NT1 and CX1 (IC(50): 54, 190 and 23 nM, respectively). Each of these three compounds presents a different mechanism of action on intracellular proliferation of T. cruzi amastigotes. CX1 shows strong trypanocidal activity, an essential characteristic for the development of drugs against the chronic stage of Chagas disease where parasites are found intracellular in a quiescent stage. NT1 has a trypanostatic effect, while PCH1 affects parasite division. The three compounds also show high activity against intracellular T. cruzi from the Y strain and against the related kinetoplastid species Leishmania major and L. amazonensis. Characterization of the anti-T. cruzi activity of molecules chemically related to the three library hits allowed the selection of two compounds with IC(50) values of 2 nM (PCH6 and CX2). These values are approximately 100 times lower than those of the medicines used in patients against T. cruzi. These results provide new candidate molecules for the development of treatments against Chagas disease and leishmaniasis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".