Solution for common nail fungus garners attention

Best poster award at prestigious international conference

July 11, 2012 - Jianping Xu, a member of the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research and Professor in the Department of Biology, received a best poster award at the 18th Congress of the International Society for Human and Animal Mycology, which took place recently in Berlin, Germany. The poster, that demonstrated a unique approach to one of world's most common nail infections, was among 12 posters recognized from more than 700 presentations .

Titled “Effective Permeation of a Novel Topical Drug that Kills that Main Causative Agent of Nail Infection,” the research involved Xu and his colleagues Heather Yoell, J. Christopher Evans and William D. Loughheed. It was sponsored by BioCepta, a start-up drug company located in Toronto.

Xu’s team developed a method to help those suffering from onychomycosis, a fungal nail infection that afflicts about five per cent of the global human population. “Despite the prevalence and social medical significance of
onychomycosis, current therapies are inadequate and effective treatments are urgently needed,” says Xu. “Effective topical treatment requires the drug to penetrate into and/or through the nail plate and to be effective on the ventral side of the nail. Unfortunately, testing drug permeation through the human nail has been problematic.”

To address this problem, Xu’s team developed a simple method that reliably contains a drug on one side of the nail while permitting direct observation and controlled infection on the other side.

“Our analyses using this method show that a novel topical drug bioCEPTA PM effectively penetrates the human nail and kills the main agent of onychomycosis Trichophyton rubrum throughout the infected nail. Our results indicate a promising novel topical treatment for hundreds of millions of patients suffering from onychomycosis.”