Elusive protein and key to many tropical diseases found after decades of searching

A chance decision to attend a lecture led to the discovery of an elusive protein and promising drug target for parasites causing some of the world’s most notorious neglected tropical diseases – Chagas disease, sleeping sickness and leishmaniasis. As this protein had been so slippery and hard to track down some doubted that it even existed in these parasites at all. This is because Pex3 is described as the master regulator for the formation of organelles called peroxisomes. Trypanosomes use Pex3 and the other Pex proteins to assemble a specific set of peroxisomes called glycosomes, which are essential for the breakdown of glucose from host blood.