Use of Optical Imaging Technology in the Validation of a New, Rapid, Cost-Effective Drug Screen as Part of a Tiered Screening Paradigm for Development of Drugs To Treat Cutaneous Leishmaniasis.

In any drug discovery and development effort, a reduction in the time of the lead optimization cycle is critical to decrease the time to license and reduce costs. In addition, ethical guidelines call for the more ethical use of animals to minimize the number of animals used and decrease their suffering. Therefore, any effort to develop drugs to treat cutaneous leishmaniasis requires multiple tiers of testing that start with higher-throughput efficacy assessments and progress to lower-throughput models with the most clinical relevance.