Review Paper:
Mushroom and mushroom-derived
compounds in the management of Leishmaniasis
Bhattacharya Ishita and Paul Santanu
Res. J. Biotech.; Vol. 20(1); 250-259;
doi: https://doi.org/10.25303/201rjbt2500259; (2025)
Abstract
Leishmaniasis is a zoonotically affected disease caused by the vector-borne parasite
Leishmania and transmitted by an infected female Phlebotomine sandfly. It infects
2 million people every year causing more than 50000 deaths among the affected in
nearly 100 endemic countries. Hepatosplenomegaly, musculoskeletal pain, kidney failure,
chronic fever and a weakened immune system that is susceptible to some different
diseases are the most prominent symptoms of the disease. Medical treatments are
based on age-old antimonial and new therapies used in the treatment are the combination
of drugs of liposomal amphotericin B, paromomycin and miltefosine. One of the principal
challenges in these curatives is resistance, a long-term convoluted routine with
a lot of disastrous side effects and high prices.
Naturally derived compounds can be one of the options in medical therapy and many
anti-leishmanial compounds have been found from natural background till now with
leishmanicidal properties. Mushrooms, one of the key members of nature, enriched
with a plethora of bioactive molecules, play a vital role in the prevention of human
diseases. To understand the progress in natural medicine, scientific reports published
in ISI PubMed, Google Scholar, Scopus and Science Direct from 2006 to 2023 on mushrooms
and mushroom-derived compounds having anti-leishmanial properties were summarized.
In this study, we have tried to report the novel mushrooms and their potential to
combat Leishmaniasis, revealing their mode of action which will be helpful in the
future for the identification of bioactive molecules resourcing from mushrooms.
