Most of the parasitic and some bacterial infections are responsible for the most relevant public health problems in developing countries. However, most of them are considered Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) according to the World Health Organization due to the low level of attention given to the actualization of therapy, vaccines and diagnosis. In most of the cases, the presently existing therapeutical alternatives for NTDs are ineffective and present several drawbacks such as severe toxicity for the patients, low rate of cure, emergence of resistance to drugs in use, among others. The genomes of several organisms causing NTDs have been sequenced and annotated, producing enormous quantities of information on these organisms. From these data, new metabolic, intracellular signaling, intercellular communication and resistance to stress pathways have been and still are being described. The developments of technologies like gene knockout or knockdown have contributed to genetically validate proteins (or entire pathways) as putative drug targets. Finally, computational methods for inferring macromolecules structures, the fitness of small drugs in catalytic sites of enzymes by docking techniques, allow designing compounds with inhibitory activities of critical functions.
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