In Search of the Vaccine Against Chagas Disease: A Tedious Road of More Than 100 Years

Abstract

Chagas disease is a neglected and widely distributed parasitic disease in America, caused by Trypanosoma cruzi parasites. Currently, there are 6 to 7 million infected people and between 60 to 80 million people remain at risk of infection in endemic areas. Normally the infection does not manifest itself in the acute phase or it does so in a mild and nonspecific way, but several years later infected people suffer from heart or digestive system problems with varying degrees of disability and even death. In the acute stage of the infection, there are treatments with antiparasitic drugs that are effective and that are why it is very important to treat children who are born infected. During the chronic phase, on the other hand, the effectiveness of the treatment has been much debated by experts, and recent multicenter studies carried out throughout Latin America showed that, although drugs eliminate the parasite, they are not effective in preventing the development of the illness. Therefore, it is an urgent need to have new strategies to control the infection and the development of the disease, therefore, the objective of achieving a vaccine that not only prevents primary infection (when the parasite comes into contact with the body) but also controls the progression of the disease in infected people and reverses the damage associated with the infection by that obtaining a vaccine is imperative. This work aims to highlight the efforts, progress and show the different approaches in the development of the vaccine against ChD.