EFEITO DE DERIVADOS SINTÉTICOS DE CHALCONAS SOBRE FORMAS EPIMASTIGOTAS DE Trypanosoma cruzi Dm28c

Abstract

The protozoan Trypanosoma cruzi is the cause of Chagas disease (CD), a disease that affects between 6 to 7 million people in the world. Despite the severity of the disease, in Brazil, benznidazole is the reference drug for treatment, although it has low efficacy in the chronic phase of disease and causes undesirable side effects. Thus, there is a need to research new treatments for CD. A bioactive group with great therapeutic potential has drawn attention in recent years due to its multi-target property and antiparasitic activity: chalcones, a flavonoid subgroup. Synthetic chalcone derivatives are compounds of interest for their probable activity against T. cruzi. With this objective, this study investigated the effect of synthetic chalcone derivatives on epimastigote forms of T. cruzi, determining the 50% inhibitory concentration (IC50) and evaluating the morphology of the parasites treated with IC50. This is an experimental study with in vitro assays using a population of T. cruzi strain Dm28c For the tests, the epimastigote form of the parasite was used and subjected to treatments with different concentrations of synthetic chalcone derivatives for 72 hours to determine the IC50/72h. For morphological evaluation, the parasites were treated with the IC50/72h of each compound, followed by the preparation of microscopy slides and coloring using the Panoptic method. The experiments were performed in triplicate; for the analyses, Microsoft Excel 2020 was used, and for the determination of IC50 values, it was utilized the GraphPad Prism 7.04. Among the findings of this study, five of the six synthetic chalcone derivatives showed anti-T. cruzi activity, as they were able to affect the parasite morphology by altering cell size, flagellum visibility, and the occurrence of cellular debris. However, other in vitro tests are suggested to allude to the mechanisms of action of the compounds. It was concluded that the synthetic chalcone derivatives were active against the epimastigote forms of T. cruzi strain Dm28c and present themselves as potential therapeutic compounds for CD.