Ricerc@Sapienza

In recent decades, a rising rate of syphilis infection, often in association with HIV, has been recorded in Europe. In the first years following their appearance, syphilis and HIV shared the character of “new”, challenging and serious diseases. The prime example of a “new disease”, syphilis appeared between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance period, a time in which medicine was changing from a dogmatic to an experimental discipline.

Since 1892, one century after the Discovery of Mycobacterium Tuberculosis as the causal agent of the disease by Robert Koch in Berlin, on March 24th each year the WHO celebrates the TBC day

Tuberculosis (TB) and humans have coexisted for more than 40,000 years; however TB remains a global threat to human kind. The international community has developed new tools for early detection, but TB strains evolved acquiring resistance to first-line therapeutic drugs with increasing treatment challenges. Furthermore, TB has formed also an alliance with human immunodeficiency virus; in this way the poorest populations are most affected. The current vaccine planning activity includes 14 new vaccines against TB (11 of those in the phaseII/III) developed with different techniques.

At the end of the eighteenth century, following the middel-class and industrial revolution, important urbanization phenomena arose - dragging with them social and sanitary issues

No abstract available

COVID-19 is a respiratory tract infection caused by the new coronavirus SARS-COV2 that can be complicated by acute distress respiratory syndrome and multiorgan failure. In light of the high rate of mortality associated with COVID-19, pharmacological and non-pharmacological strategies to prevent the infection are currently being tested. Among non-pharmacological preventive measures, vaccines represent one of the main resources for public health.

Health care workers (HCW) are particularly at risk of acquiring tuberculosis (TB), even in countries with low TB incidence. Therefore, TB screening in HCW is a useful prevention strategy in countries with both low and high TB incidence. Tuberculin skin test (TST) is widely used although it suffers of low specificity; on the contrary, the in vitro enzyme immunoassay tests (IGRA) show superior specificity and sensitivity but are more expensive.

The International Standards for Tuberculosis Care define the essential level of care for managing patients who have or are presumed to have tuberculosis, or are at increased risk of developing the disease. The resources and capacity in the European Union (EU) and the European Economic Area permit higher standards of care to secure quality and timely TB diagnosis, prevention and treatment. On this basis, the European Union Standards for Tuberculosis Care (ESTC) were published in 2012 as standards specifically tailored to the EU setting.

This minireview surveys the work of our research group directed toward finding novel antimycobacterial and anti-inflammatory drugs. Many active compounds were found with a common 1,5-diarylpyrrole skeleton. Some of the synthesized compounds, designed on the basis of structure–activity relationship studies, showed very interesting activities and proved to be effective in vivo, thus providing evidence of their attractiveness for lead optimization.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) protein tyrosine phosphatases A and B (PtpA and PtpB) have been recognized as potential molecular targets for the development of new therapeutic strategies against tuberculosis (TB). In this context, we have recently reported that the naturally occurring Diels-Alder-type adduct Kuwanol E is an inhibitor of PtpB (Ki = 1.6 ± 0.1 μM). Here, we describe additional Diels-Alder-type adducts isolated from Morus nigra roots bark that inhibit PtpB at sub-micromolar concentrations.