IN VITRO ANTILEISHMANIAL ACTIVITY AND CYTOTOXICITY OF SOME INDIAN TRADITIONAL MEDICINAL PLANTS AGAINST SENSITIVE AND RESISTANT STRAINS OF LEISHMANIA DONOVANI
Anamika Ganeti, Rupinder Kaur, Jaspreet Kaur and Sukhbir Kaur*
ABSTRACT
Visceral leishmaniasis is a renowned neglected tropical disease responsible for affecting poor people in developing countries like India. However, the treatment options are very few due to resistance to first line drugs like sodium stibogluconate, toxicity and high cost of other available drugs. Hence, this is of utmost importance to develop safe, effective and inexpensive drugs especially from plant resources.
Therefore, the present study is an effort to discover plants whose extracts can be used as antileishmanial agents in future. Three plants have been examined for their phytochemical constituents, antileishmanial activity and cytotoxicity. These plants significantly inhibited promastigote growth at concentrations ranging from 10 to 100 μg/ml against sensitive and resistant strains of Leishmania donovani and showed negligible cytotoxicity against HeLa cells. Therefore, it can be suggested from present study that these plants extracts and their active components can be isolated and further exploited to check their efficacy against murine visceral leishmaniasis.
Keywords: Visceral leishmaniasis, plant extracts, antileishmanial activity, cytotoxicity.
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