Israeli Study Offers Hope to Sleeping Sickness Patients
A multi-institutional team of Israeli researchers has made a breakthrough that could lead to more effective treatments for sleeping sickness, or trypanosomiasis. The condition is caused by Trypanosoma brucei, a microscopic parasite that is transmitted by the tsetse fly and is often fatal when left untreated. A joint Israeli research team from the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot and Bar-Ilan University (BIU) in Ramat Gan has now found that damaging the protein-production capacity essentially neutralizes the sleeping sickness parasite. Conducted by Nobel Prize laureate and BIU professor Shumali Michaeli and Weizmann Institute professor of chemical and structural engineering Ada Yonath, the…