An Overview on Anticancer Drugs with Antileishmanial Activity

Leishmaniasis is a major public health problem, but so far there are no effective commercially available vaccines for this disease. Its control strategy is only reliant on therapy, but currently the drugs available for the treatment of leishmaniasis are also limited and a great concern is the rapid rate of resistance to common drugs. The first step in discovery and development of new drugs is to identify an appropriate drug target. Accordingly, it is important to recognize the metabolic pathways in which the leishmania parasites live and selecting a target in the parasite biological pathway, absent in the host or different from the host homolog. Discovery of new drugs requires high costs and takes a lot of time (up to 15 years). Therefore, choosing the approved drugs in the market for various diseases, including leishmaniasis is very cost-effective considering the mechanism of drug action and other aspects. Miltefosin is an effective anti-cancer agent that is also used for different types of leishmaniasis. In recent years, researchers have focused on the anti-leishmanial effects of pharmaceutical compounds or anticancer drugs to find more effective compounds with lower side effects. The present article mainly reviews the anticancer drugs that have been tested for their anti-leishmanial effects in both in vitro and in vivo conditions.