Guest Editors
Walter Luyten
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Department of Biology
<p>Prof. Walter Luyten has broad experience in drug discovery and early development (including in antimicrobials), microbiology, natural products, -omics techniques, molecular biology, high throughput screening, and bioinformatics. He is a co-inventor on over two dozen patents, some of which cover marketed products. His main areas of interest are receptor pharmacology, molecular biology of receptors, G-protein-coupled receptors, nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, nanoparticles, peptidomics, drug discovery and development, medicinal plants, natural products, antimicrobials, ethnopharmacology, and ageing.</p>
Sujogya Panda
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Department of Biology
<p>Dr. Sujogya Kumar Panda holds a BSc in Botany (Honors) and a MSc in Applied and Industrial Microbiology, with a specialization in Pharmaceutical & Clinical Microbiology. He is trained in natural products and obtained a PhD working on medicinal plants. Formerly a faculty member at the Department of Microbiology, M.P.C (Auto) College and Department of Biotechnology, North Orissa University, he has an eclectic background that includes teaching, research, writing, and publishing. During the last 15 years, he has worked in the field of ethnopharmacology, green synthesis of nanoparticles, and infectious diseases. Dr. Panda has received a Young Scientist award from Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), Govt. of India, an Erasmus-Mundus postdoc scholarship from Lund University, Sweden, and a CICOPS scholarship from the University of Pavia, Italy, to continue postdoctoral research. Dr. Panda successfully completed major research projects funded by the Department of Science and Technology, University Grant Commission SERB (India), and is currently involved in H2020 and <em>multiple</em> stakeholders’ projects of KU Leuven, Belgium. At present, he is continuing research on anti-aging in <em>C. elegans</em> as a model organism.</p>
Collection Overview
Parasite diseases are common in both humans and animals, and they cause significant economic losses. Protozoan parasites infect billions of people worldwide, causing significant morbidity and economic impact. The search for new therapeutic or preventive drugs is all the more urgent due to the lack of effective vaccines and emerging drug resistance. Medicinal plants, including their essential oils, are a promising source of therapies. Their traditional use often spans centuries, and their safety (or not) is usually well established. However, the compounds responsible for anthelmintic activity have not been identified yet in most medicinal plants.
The bottlenecks are to find a suitable model organism, as well as to identity the bioactive compounds and their mechanisms of action. The free-living nematode, C. elegans, is an excellent model system for the discovery of new drugs and for characterizing their mechanisms of action or resistance. A strategy to address the above challenge is high-throughput screening. This approach typically uses robotic sample handling, rapid data acquisition, and sophisticated software and compound library management systems to conduct thousands—even millions—of small-scale experiments and identify the most promising hit compounds.
The proposed collection has the intention of updating the scientific techniques for finding plant-based compounds effective against parasitic nematodes of humans or animals. Innovation of the techniques both in vitro and in vivo used in drug discovery and development, as well as hit identification and validation related to parasites are welcome.