Zinc from an Essential Element to an Antiparasitic Therapeutic Agent.

Tropical parasitic diseases affect millions of people around the world, particularly in poor countries. The human parasitic diseases that will be covered in this review are malaria and neglected diseases, such as leishmaniasis, Chagas disease, and African trypanosomiasis. The current treatments for these diseases present several problems, such as the development of drug resistance, very limited drugs available in the clinic, significant side effects of the drugs, and a long treatment period. For these reasons, there is an urgent need to develop new chemotherapeutics to eradicate or eliminate these diseases. Zinc-based drugs against parasitic diseases could be an alternative therapy to overcome the difficulties of the approved metallodrugs as antiparasitic agents. Zinc-based drugs are becoming an exciting field of research because zinc is an essential element that can lead to the development of multitarget antiparasitic agents, which are reviewed here.