Molecular pharmacologist Tag E. Mansour, PhD, professor emeritus and Donald E. and Delia B. Baxter Professor (1978-1999), addresses the persistent worldwide problem of parasitic infections and the ongoing challenge of designing drugs to combat them in his new book Chemotherapeutic Targets in Parasites: Contemporary Strategies.

Parasitic infections are the most prevalent of human diseases. Parasites’ effective evasion of their hosts’ immune defenses and their complex physiology and life cycles make them especially resistant to attack by drugs. Malaria is still one of the most deadly infections in history. While the genetic code of the malaria parasite as well as that of the mosquito that carries the disease are known, malaria remains a killer, taking the lives of 2.7 million people a year, one million of them children.

Written with Joan MacKinnon Mansour, his wife and research colleague, Mansour advocates the latest molecular strategies for identifying antiparasitic agents and the design of more selective and less toxic drugs.

Chapter topics include the search for antiparasitic agents; biophysical, genomic and proteomic analysis of drug targets; and specific types of chemotherapeutic agents and their targets in malaria, trypanosomes, leishmania and other organisms.