SEOUL, Aug. 28 (Xinhua) -- South Korean scientist Lee Soo-hee found a new way of treating parasitic disease, including the African sleeping sickness, the Korean Times reported Monday.

    Lee, 27, is now leading a team at Johns Hopkins Medical School. Her research was published as biological journal Cell's cover story in its Aug. 25 issue. Her discovery was hailed as a breakthrough for development of new drugs to fight the African sleeping sickness and other diseases.

    Lee said discovered a previously unknown way of forming the fatty acids that form the outer layer of all animal cells after a three-year research. The parasites named trypanosomes use a nenzyme called elongases to change their outer layer, in a process she dubbed the elongase pathway, to hide itself from the human immune system.

    The discovery could open the way to treatment of other parasitic illnesses as well as the sleeping sickness, Lee said."It's highly likely other organisms, especially other trypanosomatids such as that causing Chagas' disease and leishmaniasis (Dum-Dum fever), may utilize the elongase pathway for fatty acids synthesis. Thus, the pathway could be a drug target for other diseases," she said.

    Sleeping sickness, which is the main target of Lee's research, is transmitted though the bite of the Tsetse fly. Once the parasite invades the human nerve system, the patients suffer confusion, personality changes, sleep disturbance and eventually coma and death. Moreover, "early detection is rarely achieved and the disease affects people in rural areas where medical care is also scarce," Lee said.

    The sleeping sickness threatens more than 60 million people in 26 countries of sub-Saharan Africa, and between 300,000 and 500,000 people are estimated to suffer from the disease, according to the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute.

    There are no effective vaccines so far, and in most cases patients are detected with the disease too late to be cured. Enditem