Abugri, DA; Ayariga, JA; Tiimob, BJ; Yedjou, CG; Mrema, F; Witola, WH; ,
An estimate of 60 million to 3.4 billion people are infected with one or more of the globally neglected diseases, with the most vulnerable persons being HIV-AIDS and cancer patients; organ, tissue, and blood recipients; pregnant women and their fetus; children; and immunosuppressive individuals. Some of these diseases are either zoonotic or non-zoonotic in nature. These diseases continue to adversely impact public health, veterinary, and socioeconomic issues worldwide. Several medications are available in the market for the treatment of these parasitic infections. However, these drugs have serious clinical, geographical, and socioeconomic limitations such as high toxicity, parasite-drug resistance, partial absorption by infected sites due to poor solubility, and inability to transverse across the blood-brain barrier and are highly expensive. This chapter captures reports on antiprotozoal properties of medicinal mushroom extracts and secondary metabolites starting from 1990 to 2018 and proposes their possible mechanism of action(s). Here, we have focused on the antiparasitic activity of selected mushrooms against selected parasites (Plasmodium spp., Trypanosome spp., Leishmania spp., Schistosoma spp., Haemonchus contortus, Ditylenchus dipsaci, Heterodera glycines, and Pheretima posthuma). We observed that the minimum inhibitory concentration for 50% of parasites (IC50s) of most extracts from the common mushrooms and their isolated compounds tested were within the ranges (0.06–54 μg/mL) often reported for common antiparasitic drugs in vitro. The extracts and isolated compounds were found to be nontoxic to host cells in vitro or in vivo, but these extracts and their secondary metabolites targeted cell membrane and lysing cells, caused cell arrest, disrupted mitochondrion function and ribonucleic acid, damaged DNA, disrupted phospholipids, caused auto-oxidation degradation and metal chelation, and induced oxidative stress.