Fighting the skin disease killing Australia’s wombats.
New research into a mite that causes itchy, infectious skin diseases in mammals is now helping Australia’s effort to stop a deadly mange in wombats.
After three years of research into the molecular biology and genetics of the wombat mite, the University of the Sunshine Coast-led collaboration has been awarded a New South Wales Government grant to determine the most effective drug treatment to stop the disease spreading in bare-nosed wombats.
Kate, who has two decades of experience in researching scabies in humans, said sarcoptic mange in wombats was caused by a similar microscopic, parasitic mite.
Kate, UniSC Professor of Pathophysiology Robert Harvey and PhD student Kotaro Takano said participating in fieldwork had shown them the severe distress of infected wombats and the challenges faced by wildlife carers trying to treat the animals in the wild.
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Concern about drug resistance in scabies mites is not isolated to wombats.
Why don’t certain chemicals that kill other skin parasites work well in this instance? Are there application issues? Is drug metabolism a factor? Is something else happening in the mite at a cellular level?".
Professor Harvey, an expert in molecular neuroscience, explains that specific ion channels are the key targets of acaricides - the drugs that kill mites.
“As the ion channel genes are conserved between scabies mites isolated from different animal hosts, our research findings are directly translatable to human scabies,” he said.
“We are analysing mite ion channel sequences in the lab and are already seeing interesting variations in ion channel genes that could cause altered responses to certain drugs.”
