For human health, leishmaniasis is among the most important protozoan diseases, superseded only by malaria. Globally, 10 to 12 million people are infected with 1.5 million new cases every year. The development of cheaper new drugs is urgently needed for this neglected disease that is developing resistance to current treatments. Chemotherapy remains the only treatment option for the bulk of patients. However, this is largely unaffordable for most. In the past three years numerous advances in drug discovery have been made for treating this disease by exploiting diverging metabolic pathways between the Leishmania enzymes and their hosts, using nanotechnology to target the immune cell phagolysosomes where Leishmania resides.

Leishmaniasis, Impact and Therapeutic Needs; Anti-leishmanial Drug Discovery: Past, Present and Future Perspectives; From Bench to Bedside: Development and Optimization of Clinical Therapies for Visceral Leishmaniasis; Drug Assay Methodology in Leishmaniasis: From the Microplate to Image Analysis; The Pursuit of Novel Anti-leishmanial Agents by High-throughput Screening (HTS) of Chemical Libraries; Omics and Their Impact on the Development of Chemotherapy Against Leishmania; In silico Tools for Target Identification and Drug Molecular Docking in Leishmania; Medicinal Chemistry Strategies to Discover New Leishmanicidal Drugs; Natural Products as a Source of New Drugs Against Leishmania; Organometallic Compounds in Chemotherapy Against Leishmania; New Avenues for Drug Delivery in Leishmania: Using Treatment of Visceral Leishmaniasis with Amphotericin B as an Exemplar; Addressing the Molecular Biology of Leishmania for Drug Development; The Physical Matrix of the Plasma Membrane as a Target: The Charm of Drugs with Low Specificity; Nutrient Transport and Sensing as Pharmacological Targets for Leishmaniasis; Carbon Metabolism as a Drug Target in Leishmania; The Redox Metabolism and Oxidative Stress in Leishmania as a Crossroads for the Lethal Effect of Drugs; DNA Topoisomerases as Promising Targets for Leishmania Chemotherapy; Molecular Basis of Drug Resistance in Leishmania; The Macrophage-Parasite Interface as a Chemotherapeutic Target in Leishmaniasis